RW13 - Holy Terror

by Richard Marcinko

  The cavalry, I hoped.

  Burp gun in hand, I burst through the open door into the night, pirouetting around the jam onto the walkway at the base of the dome. The helo had dropped into a hover on the other side of the dome, over the Left Transept.

  It was a civilian helicopter, not an Italian military chopper. Backass’s escape plan.

  As I started to cross the roof, a fusillade of bullets erupted from the columns at the base of the dome. All I could do was duck.

  So where the hell was Trace Dahlgren’s pretty little butt, anyway? Why wasn’t she waiting there to save mine, as she had so many times before? To find out we have to backtrack to the small room where she had found herself with the nuns as the security forces closed in.

  Backass hadn’t replaced all of the Vatican security team, but Trace was in neither a position or a mood to start trusting any of them. And she knew they would feel more or less the same about her. The nuns, on the other hand, did trust her, and the feeling was mutual. As soon as they saw they were cut off, one of the sisters—the oldest and frailest, by Trace’s description—pushed Trace to the back of the pack and then walked to the door. In a voice barely above a whisper, she told the first security people to arrive that the terroriste had gone through the door behind them, which led downstairs.

  “St. Peter, preserve us,” she cried in Italian, falling to her knees, supplicating St. Peter to save his church. The rest of the nuns, Trace included, dropped as well.

  How much was an act and how much genuine prayer is hard to say. But it surely saved Trace’s life. The first two guards—Backass plants, as it turned out—hesitated just long enough for four or five others to come up behind. The old nun rose and hobbled forward, urging them to do God’s work and rid the church of the terrible devils who had disappeared down the nearby staircase.

  “Si! Si!” yelled the men, and together they ran off in the wrong direction, as most of us do when we’re chasing the devil.

  Trace kissed each of the women, imploring them to warn the pope not to come to the church.

  “Where are you going, sister?” asked the oldest nun.

  “I need to get to the roof.”

  “The elevator and stairs will be guarded by now.” The nun took her by the hand and led her through the chapel to a side door that would take her to a set of stairs rarely used; when she reached the fifth landing, she could turn left and find the passage to the dome if she wished, or go the other way and get out onto the roof.

  “God is with you,” said the nun in Italian. “But just in case, have your pistol ready.”

  Trace leapt up the stairs. When she reached the landing the nun had told her about, she started for the dome. But she heard someone ahead, and so turned and went out onto the roof. She made her way across to the other side of the dome, climbing to the large windows. Even without people shooting at her, climbing up the outside of the dome wouldn’t have been all that easy, so she decided to go inside and use the rope we had taken from the cupola. She figured there was no sense worrying about alarms now and broke the glass on the nearest window. She climbed down to the base of the windows, then hung over and jumped down to the balcony. Unfortunately, the jump was a bit higher than she thought, and she hit the floor so hard she keeled to the side, sending her pistol flying from her hand.

  Inconvenient, given that two security people were just coming through the door twenty yards away.

  Fortunately, about the last thing either man expected was a flying nun careening through a window into the dome. Trace jumped to her feet and grabbed the rope we had left tied to the safety fence around the railing. One of the men took aim, but the other shouted at him not to fire; Trace didn’t stop to ask whether he was worried about hitting her or the frescoes nearby. She swung out over the space and shimmied up the line like a rat climbing from the hold of a sinking freighter as the water closed in. She pulled herself through the window of the cupola, then sliced the rope with her Emerson knife so the men couldn’t follow.

  Trace got out the laser communications gear and set up to transmit. She couldn’t get a connection right away—and then still couldn’t. She figured it was just Murph screwing with her head, until she realized that something was in her way: an approaching helicopter.

  She waited as the chopper came in. Somewhere around here I made my play inside, though she didn’t hear it because of the noise from the rotors. Finally she was able to make the connection and, without waiting for a confirmation from Doc or Danny, began broadcasting the fact that there was a bomb in the cellar of the basilica.

  Which brings us to the point where I was mistaken for a rabbit in a shooting gallery, more or less.

  My eyes were puffy from the stone and plaster splinters and caked half-closed with blood. If I could have seen any better, I probably would have been more careful. I might have stayed down, or at least thought about finding a different way to the other side. But everything beyond five feet was a blur, and maybe because of that I thought there were only one or two people firing at me. So when the bullets stopped sparkling, I emptied the Beretta at the shadows.

  When I reached the bodies, I found not one or two but five. I hunted through them for a fresh magazine that would fit the gun, finally finding one.

  “Don’t bother, Dick!”

  The shout was punctuated by a rifle butt to my neck. The gun and magazine flew from my hand and careened across the roof. I followed it, sprawling against the tiles.

  “Too late, Dickie!” yelled Backass. He held up a large metal box. Then he laughed, and threw it down. “Too late!”

  He sprayed his Minimi around me as I scrambled away. I scrambled around what looked like an oversized telephone booth a few yards from the dome. I reached beneath my monk’s outfit and took my last pistol, another PPK. By the time I went to return fire, though, Backass had run back toward the chopper.

  I stumbled after him. The helicopter’s two floodlights played on the roof, framing him for me. As he grabbed at the door, I fired.

  Between my blurry eyes and the bad angle, my first two shots missed high. I could hear a crusty old master chief’s voice loud and clear in my head: “Excuses are for whiners, you no-good shit-for-brain asshole idiot. Keep at it until you plug the SOB, and then plug him some more.”

  So I did. All of the subsequent subsonic rounds, personally handcrafted by Doc Tremblay, struck Backass square in the back.

  All the bastard did was throw down his gun and jump into the chopper. The son of a bitch had a bulletproof vest on under his clothes.

  I cursed, then whipped the gun at the helicopter as it started to back away.

  Trace had watched the whole thing from above. Figuring that her backup pistol wasn’t going to be taking a helicopter down, she dug into the backpack we’d left with the com gear looking for something to take the helicopter down with. All she found was the miniflare set.

  When the helo started to rise, she waited until the hatch at the rear was open and level with her and fired. The flare tailed left a few yards—right into the cockpit. Trace saw a little flicker of flame, but from her perspective it looked as if the flare had bounced against the Plexiglas and been extinguished.

  I could tell right away that it had gone through the window. The helicopter tilted on its axis as it moved away, bending over as if it were a drunk. Then its tail whipped around and it began to climb, seesawing in a three-dimensional weave across the sky. Finally it pitched forward and plummeted downward, bursting into flame just before it hit the ground.

  The glow of that fire warmed me from two or three miles away.

  The reality set in—we were standing directly above a pile of explosives big enough to send us to the moon and dig a hole to China. And the timer had already been set.

  *The bottles held liquid explosives similar to rocket fuel. The boxes contained a plastic explosive made mostly from PETN, which will ignite them and produce a pretty good explosion on their own. The pads were more plastic explosives. There was also a netwo
rk of blasting caps to get everything rolling, though I couldn’t see it from here. In layman’s terms, this is one big fucking ka-boom we’re looking at here. Not as good as a nuke, but still pretty big.

  *See Rogue Warrior: Vengeance.

  15

  The box Backass had had in his hand consisted of two toggles, neither of which was marked. Presumably it had set off a timer, though he hadn’t thought to include operating instructions with the unit. Switching the buttons the other way was just as likely to blow the bomb up immediately as shut it down.

  But what the fuck.

  I popped them. Nothing happened. I ripped the wires out of the box. Nothing happened again.

  End of problem? Or the calm before the storm?

  I started racing toward one of the doors back into the church. A pair of Vatican security people popped out when I was about ten feet from it.

  “There’s a bomb downstairs, in the area near St. Peter’s Tomb,” I yelled. By the time they reacted I was by them. A second set of guards met me just inside, but they too let me pass, either because they understood the warning I was yelling or I just seemed like too much of a madman to stop.

  Vatican security people were flooding into the cathedral, augmented by Italian soldiers, carabinieri, and members of Digos,* the counterterror unit of the Ministry of the Interior. As I ran out into the nave, a pair of riot police grabbed me, but were warned off by a familiar bark.

  “Yo! He’s with us,” said Danny. It doesn’t matter what language they’re speaking; police officers understand each other, and the carabinieri let me go. Danny and Doc were flanked by two members of ROS, the carabinieri SpecOp unit.

  “The bomb is below St. Peter’s Tomb, in the area they closed off to tourists after the other incident,” I yelled as I ran toward the entrance to the crypts. By the time I got up near the altar area, security people were already working to undo the fencing that had been installed to prevent anyone from using the underground entrance in St. Peter’s Tomb.

  “I hope that’s not your blood,” said Doc, huffing as he caught up to me.

  I pulled out the box Backass had used and shoved it into his hands. “What do you make of this? How’s the bomb wired?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Worry about me later. Why hasn’t the bomb exploded?”

  Doc pulled out a knife and pried the box open. It clearly wasn’t a detonator—we’d all be dead by now. “It may have started a timer, or locked out some sort of system to stop the bomb. My guess is that it’s somehow rigged so that once the toggles were thrown, it couldn’t be stopped. It also might be a blind.”

  “There’s definitely a bomb downstairs.”

  Doc nodded, but I saw his point. Backass had all but given me the unit. He knew I’d trace the wire down and try to disarm the bomb.

  His way, maybe, of guaranteeing I’d be inside when it blew.

  With the help of a pair of bolt cutters, the gate was removed and the security people surged downstairs. Doc, Danny, and I joined the flow. Within a few seconds, we all reached another gate. As a carabinieri struggled with the bolt cutter, one of the Digos supervisors suggested bringing a blowtorch down. That would have gotten us past the gate all right—right up to the big pearly one.

  Where we might be headed at any moment anyway.

  I twisted my fingers into the wire and with the help of one of the security people snapped the gate off its restraints after about two-thirds had been cut away. As we made our way down to the rooms that had been filled with explosives, a second group of security and ROS bomb people broke through the gates on the other side. Within seconds, they began dismantling the major components of the bomb, using a fire-brigade approach to carry out the large bottles of explosives through the winding corridors.

  Which, frankly, was probably more dangerous than using a blowtorch on the gates.

  “The wire snakes through over there,” said one of the bomb people as we examined the bomb from our side of the chamber.

  “Then whatever’s going to detonate it is in the other direction,” I said, pointing to the right side of the room. “Let’s look.”

  The others didn’t completely believe me—and all right, yes, it was a guess—but we had enough people to clear components from both sides. Rather than completely clearing the space on my side, I had just the top layer removed, enough so I could squeeze in.

  “The wire—it ends! It’s not connected!” yelled someone in Italian on the other end of the chamber.

  The others started murmuring words like “fake” in Italian. I kept crawling. About two-thirds of the way into the large chamber, along a foundation wall dating to the first basilica, I saw a large black suitcase tucked between a trio of bottles.

  “Doc!” I yelled. Then I scrunched around so I could lift one of the bottles out.

  That was all I said, but Doc knew what I meant. He stopped the rest of the chain gang and reorganized the men, so that when I managed to pull the bottle up over my body and squeeze it over my legs, someone was there to grab it.

  And drop it.

  Into Trace Dahlgren’s arms, who walked up to the pile of bottles at just that moment. She fell back, tottering under the weight and not quite realizing what she had. But before her lovely butt could hit the ground it was caught by two of the luckiest ROS agents in the world.

  You can call Trace’s timely arrival a miracle, if you want. Or you can be like her, and bitch and moan that the idiot security people had detained her for the past ten minutes, or she would have been there ten minutes earlier.

  I pulled the suitcase out and slid it back to Doc, then scrambled as gingerly as I could to get out. Doc began heading upstairs to the main floor of the church, but the fire brigade of bomb components blocked his way.

  “This way,” I yelled to him, pointing down the corridor. “Down here.”

  “There’s no exit,” said one of the Vatican people.

  “There will be soon if we don’t disable the bomb,” I said.

  The corridor opened into a large room that had once been part of a mausoleum of a well-to-do second-century Roman family. Constantine had had it filled with rubble when he built the first St. Peter’s. Now the Roman ghosts watched us as Doc examined the bag.

  “I think it’s booby-trapped,” he said. He had managed to pry the side near the latch open just enough to reveal a wire.

  “Maybe we can cut open the side.”

  “Maybe it’ll explode before we do. I’d bet there’s something along the lines of Semtex packed around the exterior.”

  “Better off taking it outside,” said Danny, who with Trace had just caught up to us.

  I bent down. Doc wedged the knife into the side a little more, twisting gently. I could see a liquid crystal watch face, but the digits were blocked by the wires and the knife blade.

  “Definitely a timer,” I told them.

  Doc gave the suitcase a pensive stare. Bomb-disposal teams have fancy X-ray machines and robot disablers; I’ve got Doc. He pried the lid up every so slightly, then a little more, then a little more.

  “I remember a bomb like this I saw once in Egypt,” he said. “They had it wired so that if you snapped open the latch, it would blow. But they had a way of disabling that. Pretty damn clever, actually. Too clever, I thought. The only reason you’d want another wire like that, would be if you thought you were going to screw up. And who the hell plans to screw up?”

  “Would you get to the fucking point?” blurted Trace.

  I put my hand on her shoulder.

  “I am getting to the point,” said Doc. “But then I realized that it wasn’t just in case you screwed up—it was to confuse someone who was trying to defeat the bomb. Because you would look at two wires, right, and you wouldn’t know which one was which. We need some wires with clips to extend the circuit so we can clip it.”

  Danny went in search of the bomb squad people to get what Doc needed. Trace took out her flashlight and we went back to examining the
suitcase.

  There were two wires, just as Doc had predicted. He used Trace’s knife to slip them out, pushing gingerly. They were twisted together, and there was less than two inches of play.

  “One of these sides must come off,” he said.

  “Let’s try to get a look at the timer,” I said. “Trace, my eyes are for shit.”

  “About time you realized you need glasses,” she said, squatting down.

  “Fuck you, too.”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  Doc and I looked at each other. Before either one of us could say anything, Trace added, “Twenty-eight seconds.”

  “We have to take a chance that one of these wires will turn off the latch wiring,” said Doc. “And then we have to disable the timer.”

  “Which one?”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Doc put his knife blade between the wires and took a breath. His fingers twitched, but he didn’t cut either one. He turned his head toward me and opened his mouth to say something. But he couldn’t force anything out.

  “Which one?” I said.

  Doc shook his head.

  “Doc?”

  “I—I don’t know if I can guess.”

  “I’ll make the call,” I said, grabbing his hand. “See you two in heaven. Or the other place.”

  *Digos is an acronym for Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali, but Italians don’t capitalize the letters.

  16

  Sure is hot down here where I’m writing this.

  But not that hot. Virginia gets its heat spells every now and again.

  I got the right wire. Once the suitcase was open, Doc’s trembling fingers had an easy time disabling the guts of the bomb. We figured out later that the timer must have been set when the bomb was originally planted. It had been set to go off before the mass, at about the time His Holiness the pope was originally scheduled to enter the basilica.