RW13 - Holy Terror

by Richard Marcinko

  *Coded as opposed to encrypted. The latter involve (usually) complex mathematical formulas that translate plain text into what looks like hieroglyphics. These are great—but like any mathematical problem, can be “solved” given enough time and computational power. A code relies on a prearranged meaning, and if used properly can be impossible to break by math alone. If you and I agree that the word Easter in an email will signal an attack, only you or I can figure that out.

  *The copy editor wants to see my math on terminal velocity, contending I could have been doing “only” 150 or so. I told him he can do the math himself. Not only will I supply the calculator and parachute, I’ll kick him out of the airplane for free. [The copy editor graciously yields to superior knowledge and/or firepower.—Copy Editor]

  *Don’t try this at home.

  14

  “Very slowly,” said the padre with the pistol, “move back from there.”

  “Here?” I said loudly. I held my hands out at my side and stepped back.

  “That way,” he said, pointing toward the left side of the nave.

  “Why?”

  He answered by raising the pistol. I took a slow step backward. Trace was somewhere nearby, and I hoped that if I moved slowly enough she would hear what was going on and ambush him. I took another step, and then tripped on one of the rugs.

  I honestly lost my footing, but if the pretend priest had been close enough I would have bowled him over. He’d remained several feet away, lowering his pistol with a slight grin as he sighted down the barrel.

  The grin was knocked off his face by a roundhouse to the side of the head by the priest who had stopped me earlier. The gun fired as he fell, the bullet ricocheting off the floor a few feet from my chest.

  “Run, my son!” said the good priest. “Get help!”

  And then he dove on the other man. The pistol flew across the floor. I scooped it up as two monks—or I should say, two men dressed as monks—ran from the back of the church, pulling Rugers from beneath their robes.

  I dropped the first with one shot. The second man slid off to the right, out of my line of fire—but right into Trace’s; she took him down with her Kimber Compact.

  “Get upstairs and get to the radio!” I yelled to her. “The bomb is in the crypt somewhere!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Go! And don’t take the elevator—they may cut the power.”

  The good priest had pinned the bad priest by his arms and was kneeling over him on the floor. I administered a dose of anesthetic—a quick kick to the bad priest’s skull—then gave the Ruger to the other man. “There’s a bomb below! Don’t let the pope into the building!”

  “By God, I won’t.”

  I bolted over the railing, sliding down the steps. It took all of two seconds for me to realize there was no way I was getting into the crypt area from here. But the sniffer got strong hits from both sides of the tomb area; I’d been walking back and forth over the explosives.

  I jumped back over the railing and headed in the direction of the entrance Karen had used during our earlier visit, now hidden behind a row of pew grandstands. Somebody shouted as I ran. Gunshots followed. I slid down in front of the entrance—which, of course, was locked. Luckily, it was only the standard brass lock, easily picked. I reached beneath my monk’s cloak and took out my lock picks. I could hear the security people running up the center of the church as I found the right one and fit it into the lock.

  Only to lose my grip and have it drop to the floor, whereupon Mr. Murphy gave it good kick under the locked gate.

  So where was Trace while Murphy and I were dancing on the main floor?

  I thought she was upstairs somewhere, retracing her steps to the balcony and the rope or maybe out on the roof, where she could climb up to the dome and then the cupola from the outside. But she wasn’t.

  As she headed toward the staircase, she found a group of nuns—real ones—lying on the floor in one of the side chapels. Trace got them up to their feet, thinking to herd them to safety. A wave of security officials appeared just as they began to move; Trace ducked to the right and the sisters went with her, following her into a side chapel and then behind an altar into a short hallway and an empty room, which turned out to be a dead end.

  The good priest must have seen me drop the pick, because he began yelling to the security people to attract their attention. Meanwhile, I fitted a slightly smaller one into the lock. No more tootsie fingers this time: I clicked open the lock and grabbed at the metal bars of the door. A few yards away the security people reached the priest, hauling him to his feet as I closed the door behind me, locking it.

  “Marcinko!” yelled someone as I slammed the door shut. “It’s Marcinko!”

  I rushed down the steps, my way lit by a dull yellow emergency bulb at the top of the passage. I twisted with the staircase, turned right and then left, then hopped down a short flight of steps that took me below the level of the papal crypts to the more ancient necropolis. By now I was completely in the dark; I pulled out my LED pinlight and pushed ahead into a narrow passage. After three or four steps, I found my way barred by a security gate, which had been installed very recently; shavings from a masonry drill used to put in the anchors lay on the floor. I picked the lock, slipped past, then pushed it closed quietly as I heard guards coming down behind me.

  The walls of the hallway looked like the sides of a Roman street, with the mausoleums to the left and right. There were crypts and huge masonry walls as well, a collection of graves and parts of the first St. Peter’s Basilica intermingling. I went down the narrow hallway in what I thought was the direction of St. Peter’s Tomb. The sound of the guards grew louder; they were at the gate I had just come through. I found an opening between two Roman sarcophagi in the wall and tucked into it, thinking it was a shallow niche I could stage an ambush from. But as I pushed in, I saw a passage behind the shadows on my right. The narrow metal door swung open easily. I went through pistol first, stooping to fit into the hallway.

  A spiderweb so thick it felt like a hand reached out to grab my face and shoulders. I fell back against the wall in the dark, listening to see if the guards were close. They sounded as if they were pounding on the security gate, so I pulled out my light to see where I was. I half expected to find the room piled with bones. But instead I found myself in what looked like a large, bricked room. There were dust-covered indentations in the walls, each numbered with Roman numerals. At the right of the room, a doorway about five feet high and maybe two feet across opened into another hallway. I squeezed through, half walking, half stooping like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

  The passage stopped at another hallway. I had the choice of left or right. As I examined it for some hint on what the right direction might be, I saw a thin black wire against the wall ahead of me.

  I turned to the right and followed the hall and the wire for about thirty feet before realizing I was moving upward. If the wire was attached to the bomb—a big guess, granted, but how many Romans ran speaker wire into their sarcophagi?—the bomb logically would be the other way. Retracing my steps, I reached the original passage, where I heard the muffled sounds of the security people who were pursuing me. I kept going, softening my breath not only to make as little sound as possible but also to hear better. The darkness had a hollow hum to it, the sort of sound that you hear in your head when you wake up in a Cambodian hotel at 3 a.m. with the AC going full blast, though it pumps nothing but hot air. The hush seemed to grow louder as I went; it was the echo of machinery from somewhere above, deadening sound throughout the underground passages.

  After about twenty feet, the passage widened enough so that my arms no longer scraped the sides. I still had to stoop, though not quite as steeply. Caged lights were hung along the top of the ceiling, running in a metal strip but not turned on; if there was a switch anywhere nearby, I didn’t see it and wouldn’t have turned it on if I did.

  A draft let me know there was another passage ahead, and sure enou
gh, twenty or so paces after the intersection I came to it. It had been gated off not only with a security fence but thick wire-mesh fencing. It had been bolted on angled pieces of iron, so there was no way to loosen it from my side.

  As I examined the gate, my flashlight beam caught dark-colored bottles about the size of water coolers stacked high to the ceiling, interspaced with thick black pads. Large boxes ringed what I could see of the room, and the bottles filled the rest of the space.

  I’d found the bomb.*

  I knelt down and picked up the wire. I could cut it easily, with my teeth if I had to, but it was likely that whoever had rigged the bomb had taken that into account. Cutting the wires might set it off rather than rendering it inert.

  I had maybe an hour to decide which it would do. In the meantime, I either had to find the detonator, or get inside the room and figure out how it worked.

  As I rose, something cold smashed my shoulder, pushing me into the fence.

  It wasn’t the hand of God, or a devil’s claw. It was the business end of a Minimi machine gun.

  “He has a pistol in his front belt, and there’ll be at least one more, probably two. Shoot him if he resists.”

  “Now why the fuck would I do that?” I growled as light flooded into my face.

  “Because you think you’ll escape eventually.”

  “I don’t think, I know.”

  Backass laughed. Two plainclothes Vatican security agents—Backass plants—were standing about six feet from me, holding machine guns with high-powered lights where scopes would normally be mounted. The lights were bright enough to blind me.

  “You haven’t changed, Marcinko. Still the arrogant American he-man, a walking, talking Superman.”

  I’d have thanked him for the compliment, but I was too busy rebounding from the sharp poke to the side of the head another of his henchmen had delivered. I started to grab for him, but he’d jumped back out of reach.

  “It’s not a problem for us to kill you here,” said Backass. “Take his gun.”

  I pulled my pistol out and slid it along the floor. Then I rolled up my right and left pants legs and took out the Glocks I had strapped there.

  “I could have killed you a dozen times,” said Backass. “You’ve been lucky. You’ve always been lucky. You complain about not having luck, about Mr. Murphy, but you’re the luckiest son of a bitch I know. You were lucky in China, in Thailand, in Las Vegas.”*

  “What about Las Vegas?”

  “I gave them the money, Dick. It’s always been me.”

  “You were too much of a wimp to take a shot at me yourself.”

  Backass laughed. He’d started moving up the corridor. The minions around me prodded me to follow. We walked up past the point where I had entered the corridor, continuing up the sloped hall for about ten feet before turning left into a hallway so narrow my shoulders touched both sides. This led to an even narrower staircase. The steps seemed to be bricks and were so shallow only about half of my foot fit on the treads. I was in the middle of the pack; if I played bowling for tangos, the best I could do would be to tumble two-thirds of them, leaving Backass to fry us at the bottom with his Minimi.

  Five or six times we reached landings no bigger than the chair you’re sitting on, reversing direction to continue upward. Then we came to a corridor similar to the one we’d started in, turned left and found another set of staircases. A string of thin, rectangular LED units illuminated the treads. There was enough light for me to see the thin wire that came up along the staircase—the detonator wire.

  We reached another corridor, this one a succession of zigzags, before finding yet another staircase. Here the walls were farther apart, though I had to lean forward slightly, my head just brushing the ceiling rafters. The steps curved—we’d reached the dome and were moving up toward the cupola. I hoped Trace would be waiting at the top, MP5 ready.

  “So you hate my guts, huh?” I said. “How’d I manage to make such an impression? I don’t even know you.”

  “There are many of us, Marcinko, an army of people you have fucked. Some are Muslim. Some are Asian. Some are American. A number even were part of your navy. We’re members of a very large club—people screwed by Dick.”

  “I don’t screw people. I treat everyone equally—”

  “Like shit.”

  “Well, at least you read the books.”

  I stopped, putting my hand on the wall and pushing a forlorn breath out of my lungs. Any EMT within listening distance would have called a stretcher.

  “You’re getting old, Demo Dick. A has-been. I’m doing you a favor,” snorted Backass from above.

  “How’s that?”

  “There’s nothing more pathetic than a broken-down old sailor. Look at yourself. You can’t even walk up a flight of stairs. You’re a wreck.”

  I wheezed louder.

  “When you saw me in Cairo I was a boy,” he said. “But you let your man shoot me even so.”

  “When was that?”

  “When you kidnapped my father.”

  Of all the things I’ve ever done—and there have been many—I’ve only kidnapped one person in Egypt.

  “Azziz was your father?”

  “How did it feel to shoot a child, Marcinko? Did it make you feel good? But I didn’t die.”

  The incident he was referring to had gone down when I was on Uncle Sugar’s black payroll with Green Team, a successor to Red Cell. We’d been sent into the Cairo slums to apprehend Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin from his flop there and take him to a place more likely to induce candid discussion. Azziz was a scumbag of the highest sort, a terrorist before it was fashionable to be a terrorist, a truly sick psycho who’d organized several plots against Westerners.

  A boy—his age was somewhere between twelve and sixteen—had popped out of the hallway just before we hit Azziz’s pad. Nasty Nicky Grundle popped the kid with a silenced MP5 before he could give us away. We thought at the time that he was one of the bodyguards, but I have to admit he didn’t show a gun. It was certainly possible that he was an innocent bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Not pretty, but war’s like that. Ask any of the sixty-five people in New York, Chicago, Houston, or D.C. Azziz killed before we bundled his ass off to face justice.

  “I wasn’t the one who shot you.”

  “You do remember. Good. Allah was with me that morning,” Backass continued. “In many ways. Only one of your man’s bullets hit—and that in my shoulder. I still have the slug.”

  “I’ll have to tell Nick he should take some target practice.”

  “I was taken to live with my mother’s uncle, adopted—and trained to fulfill my fate. The crusader side of my family believed I was with them, but I have worked since that day to achieve my vision.”

  He rattled on, spewing the usual self-delusional bullshit about being anointed as the savior of his religion and his people. You’d think an egocentric maniac would at least make an effort to be original; just once I’d like to hear one of the chosen say, “I don’t know if I’m really God’s choice, but fuck it; I’m going for it anyway.”

  To fill in the backstory: Backass was hustled off to one of his European aunties to recuperate. For his protection, he was given the identity of a cousin who had died two years before of typhoid. The rest of his background—the connection with European aristocrats, etc.—that the security agencies relied on when they checked him out came from this part of his family. He’d led a double life from that morning in Cairo.

  If not sooner.

  I let him gloat for a while, making sure he had the conceit juices flowing.

  “So, is this your funeral pyre, or do you have an escape plan?” I asked.

  He just laughed.

  “How are you going to blow us up? I take it I saw rocket fuel down there. As I understand it, that stuff won’t ignite on its own.”

  “Still full of yourself, huh, Dickie?”

  “Well if you’re so much in control, how are you going t
o do it?”

  Backass simply turned and continued walking up the steps.

  The breeze in the passageway had gradually picked up, and the air became chilly and damp as we went. I started to pick up the pace, closing the distance between myself and Backass. But I’d played the tired old fuck a bit too hard; a turn of the staircase later and he was already outside. One of the two guards above me jogged toward the exit. I waited until only one was left in front of me, and then sprang, grabbing his leg and pulling him down, rolling to the side and firing my pistol with my left hand into the assholes behind me.

  Yes, I’d given up my hideaway Glocks. But a monk’s habit is big enough to conceal many things, including a seven-shot PPK .380.

  The little gun sounded like a runaway subway train. Because the staircase was so steep, the guards behind me couldn’t elevate their weapons properly, or at least not quickly enough to avoid getting shot. I didn’t have that problem.

  The machine gun the tango had been carrying clattered by me on the staircase. I took a swipe at it, but the law of gravity has more pull than the law of necessity, and I missed. As I ducked down after it, guards from somewhere below began firing. A shower of stone splinters and lead filled the landing. I grabbed for the machine gun and pulled it up to fire just as they turned the corner. About mid-blast, my face seemed to catch fire and I fired blindly, working the gun back and forth. I lost my balance and tumbled down, six or seven steps. By the time I landed, all of the other gunfire had stopped.

  I had to use my thumb to open my eyes. Blood covered my hand when I finally managed to see. I’d been hit in the face, chest, and neck—I could feel the pain—but since I was still breathing, I figured it had been by stone shrapnel from the centuries-old wall. There were four bodies near me on the landing, and another two on the steps behind the bend. One of the men had a Model 12S Beretta with a fresh magazine taped to the spent box; I grabbed it, loaded, and started trudging up toward the door. A helicopter began pounding the air in the distance.