by Rick Jones
As the cries of the wounded filled the room with too many hands reaching for Father Savino, this priest who served a religion that was not their own had touched as many as he could by grazing his fingertips amongst the dying, letting them know that a greater life existed beyond their pain.
On a gurney by the far wall lay a small girl of maybe eight or nine. She was pretty and had angelical features with eyes the size of saucers and natural dimples. Her hair was raven and her complexion like tanned leather. When Father Savino approached her, however, she remained unaware of his presence and spoke nonsensically to something only she could see.
Grabbing her hand within his, Father Savino prayed. And as he prayed, the priest brushed a lock of hair away from the child’s forehead with a gentle sweep of his forefinger. The girl, who had the face of an angel, also had an injury that was too great to overcome. Her legs were missing, the child a victim of a mortar round. As Father Savino pulled back the sheet, he could see that the wrappings had become saturated with a color that was candy-apple red, as her blood leeched onto the sheets beneath her. She was bleeding out, her life ebbing with the flow.
Taking her tiny hand into both of his, Father Savino pleaded for the life of this child, for this angel who was one of His creations, a soul that had a purpose. People called out to the priest with their extended hands wanting to touch this wizard who had the power to resurrect a dying hope and a wilting faith. Cries continued to fill the venue as haunting wails; this place a Hell for sure. But Father Savino focused on the child, on his angel, begging and beseeching his Lord to rekindle a spark within the child, and give it breath to fan the fire. But Father Savino could see the light fading from the child’s eyes, that small ember that turned into a mote . . .
. . . And then it was gone.
Though she continued to stare ceilingward as her chest settled for a final time, Father Savino saw only deadness within her eyes.
Stepping back and raising his hands before him, he examined them with an odd curiosity and disappointment. Then as tears began to sting his eyes, he realized that he didn’t have enough magic, after all.
Around him, the wounded continued to beg for the mercy of any God who would listen to them through this messenger, though their mercies may have fallen on deaf ears as Father Savino began to weep.
CHAPTER NINE
Central Syria
In Syria, a reestablishing caliphate was making examples of villagers who wore the orange jumpsuits as they knelt before their executioners. Heathenistic indictments flew in condemnation of these men, nothing but unfounded accusations to bolster a propaganda campaign as to who held the scepter of rule once again. Some of the villagers wept, whereas some begged or even accepted their fate as they waited for the knife to cross their throats.
The Accuser, who was dressed in camo with a cloth draped around his mouth to hide his features, pontificated before a camera to build drama before the executions that were to be streamed live.
His name was Ahmed Ali, a vicious individual who was a second lieutenant to Junaid Hassad and perhaps the most emphatic extremist within the cabal. He was born to pious parents who believed that the Light of Islam shined brightly in the hearts of all men. The true tenets promoted love and the prosperity of extending kindness to one another. Ahmed Ali, however, had grown to see a different approach, one that did not tolerate the principles of revering other gods or their religions. Such blasphemy, despite the tenets preached by his parents, fell on deaf ears as Ali believed that violence was the only way to curb such sacrilege, using terror.
He had slaughtered people who could not protect themselves and had separated heads from shoulders with relish and contained madness, all in the name of Allah. As he chose who lived or died with a simple pointing of his finger at villagers who stood in line to await their final judgment, this had given Ali a sense of absolute power. And he wielded this uncontested power with impunity since there was no one to contest him.
Under the orders of Junaid Hassad, Ahmed Ali had traipsed across the landscape conscripting teenage boys into their leagues to become Allah’s warriors, and the new heirs to a new kingdom based on terrorism.
Parents who rebelled against such actions were quickly taken down to their knees, and their children were goaded after they were handed a knife to run the blades across their parent’s throats. Children who refused were summarily executed and made examples of in front of their parent’s, a swift beheading, with the parents slaughtered in the same brutal manner. The point to Ali’s butchery was to quash any willingness to stand against ISIS. To do so only invited cruelty or death, perhaps both. Therefore, select Allah as your king of kings or suffer the consequences.
To reject the caliphate deserves death!
Join us and become in league with Allah!
Become an Islamic warrior and kill the infidels.
All of these had become the recruiting cries that enchanted so many. And those who rebuffed these promotional shouts often became the carrion for the desert scavengers.
ISIS began to resurrect itself by leaps and bounds, a spreading cancer that had little to stop its growth outside of the Turkish forces to the north. The Americans were either withdrawing their forces or redirecting them to the Iranian border to assure that Iran contained its saber rattling. And NATO forces were all but nonexistent.
After months passed, the legion grew, trained, and once again became a formidable terrorist faction. Syria, again, was becoming the hotbed of extremism with the rally cry now outshouting those who needed help or salvation.
ISIS once again ruled with Junaid Hassad wearing the king’s crown and Ahmed Ali serving as the madman by his side.
And once again as a darkness crept, the cry across the land was the same, a chant: Allahu Akbar!
. . . Allahu Akbar! . . .
. . . Allahu Akbar! . . .
As Ahmed Ali finally finished his diatribe before the camera, he gave a predetermined gesture to the executioners to commence with the executions. The camera did not pan away as knives were driven across throats to open a second horrible mouth, a gash so deep that the esophagus and the tendon of the Adam’s Apple could be seen as the knife sawed deep against dying gurgles and detonating eyes of terror, as the executioners vowed to remove heads in the name of Allah.
Allahu . . . Akbar!
* * *
For the months that Shari Cohen observed from the sidelines, she never felt so impotent because she was a think-tank representative of the CIA whose insistences went virtually unheeded with a ‘let’s wait and see what happens’ attitude from the principals.
In the meantime, fledgling warriors were trained to become formidable ones. Innocent people were being killed if they did not buy in to the regime’s ideologies. And children, some as young as twelve, were forced into the ISIS ranks as suicide soldiers.
Let’s wait and see what happens.
How much more do we need to see in order to draw a picture?
Let’s wait and see what happens.
Are we to stand by and do nothing as they get stronger?
Let’s wait and see what happens.
Until when? When it’s too late?
Let’s wait and see what happens.
Shari had never been so frustrated or felt so useless in her performance.
Why am I even here?
We observe. That’s what we do, until the political principals say otherwise.
Inside the Command Center within the Green Zone, Shari watched as people like Junaid Hassad and Ahmed Ali electrified and captivated their people with a romanticism not seen since ISIS first formed.
All we did was put out a fire, Shari thought. Now the flames are once again turning into a pyre.
Standing on the tier watching the monitors play out while the eye in the sky mapped out movement through the region, Shari Cohen wondered why she was there to provide narratives of intelligence, only for them to be buried.
Let’s wait and see what happens.
And
the reason for that saintly patience on the part of the leadership was because they had sent CIA specialist Henry Faizan to infiltrate the ISIS regime so that Langley could get real-life data from within. As soon as the principals determined that the opportunity favored the Company, then she would be called to action and not a moment sooner.
Remaining in the wings to get involved, Shari Cohen waited.
CHAPTER TEN
The Vatican
Five Months Later
The church had always been home to Kimball Hayden and the Vatican Knights his brothers. And with the support of his team, Kimball excelled physically to be the best he could be.
By the end of the month he had tossed his crutches aside and had begun to walk a normal gait, though slowly. By the second month he was walking at a brisk pace and lifting weights, the muscle mass returning with a full intake of daily carbs and proteins. By the fourth month he was jogging, then running, then doing sprints, the man moving like a gleeful child that discovered what the legs could do, what they were meant for, and he ran like the wind, laughing and appreciating the fact that he could rise above adversity to become the very best. By the fifth month he remastered his techniques with the use of double-edged weapons, with firearms, and with the techniques of martial arts. Despite the marks of his burns or the lateral scars from a slicing blade or the pock marks that memorialized his gunshot wounds, Kimball Hayden was again on top as the most lethal of the Vatican Knights.
On the last day of his recovery, as he stood before the mirror inside the gym, Kimball Hayden truly appraised himself. His physique was once again heavy with bands of muscle that strained against the tissue of his skin, now marred with substantial imperfections. His abdomen and his back held the slashes of once open wounds, the written reminders of his life with each cut marking the struggles of his legacy. Indents peppered his chest, all being the hallmark wounds where he had been shot. And the white scars that crisscrossed over his tanned legs like the lines of a roadmap, would forever remain as evidence as to where the rods had to be placed to make him whole.
Kimball continued to stare at his ever-evolving image, wondering how much more his body could take. Then he noted his burned arm and how much lighter the skin was from the rest of his body. Lifting the damaged appendage, he could see the sickening swirls where the skin had burned and melted. It was a disfigurement for sure, but not one to restrict movement. Letting his arm drop by his side, Kimball recalled the moment when he last stood before a mirror. He was at the hospital, on crutches, an unfinished monster.
Kimball gazed into the mirror and gave a one-sided smile, the man at peace with what he had become.
The monster, once unfinished, was now complete.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Wastelands of Syria
In the 1970s, the CIA created nano-sized drones at a time when the government required a miniature listening device, so they developed a mechanical bumblebee and dragonfly. Though the design of the bee was scrapped because it was too difficult to manage, the mini dragonfly drone, also abandoned because of its problem with wind at the time, was later resurrected after the CIA saw the worthiness of the dragonfly drone during the Middle East conflict. Over the past five decades the device had been reconfigured and recrafted with advanced technology. And with no wind inside of caves to run interference with its flight path, the Company was able to utilize this state-of-the-art equipment to map out subterranean systems using infrared lenses and laser mapping algorithms. The caves in Afghanistan and Syria were primary charting targets, with the drones going virtually unseen. Even with the leaps in technological advancement over the years, the drones’ operating system had to be performed manually from 500 feet, meaning that the operator had to be in proximity of the targeted site, which was always a danger.
Henry Faizan, the CIA operative from the borders of Iraq’s Green Zone, had infiltrated the ranks of the ISIS faction as a recruit who allegedly became bewitched by the videos of Ahmed Ali, the messages he learned from them an evocation to a higher calling.
Faizan was welcomed with open arms and accepting smiles. When asked of his backstory, he informed his processing officer that he was from a small village to the south. During the civil war he lost his entire family—mother, father and two siblings, a brother and a sister, both younger. He even gave names which checked out, even though the names were a fabrication of the CIA who allowed the disinformation to be hacked by the ‘black-hats’ that served ISIS. As far as the faction was concerned, Henry Faizan, who went by the alias of Jinan Samara, which they knew him by, checked out.
After months of training and raising his AK-47 high in the name of Allah, Henry Faizan, now Jinan Samara, was the Company’s front-line man in the ISIS theater of operation. He had hungered in the desert of Syria, something that was to be expected, and slept within the cave systems on frigid nights. It was here while under the cover of darkness and during early morning hours, that Faizan removed a small plastic case from his bag and opened it. Inside was a drone shaped like a dragonfly, fragile and thin looking. He carefully pinched the unit between his thumb and forefinger and placed it on a boulder that was waist high. The plastic case was also the unit's remote when flipped over. Faizan then checked the wings of the drone, which fluttered so quickly that they couldn’t be seen by the naked eye. Then he checked the scanner of the drone’s eye, which was made to look like the compound eye of a dragonfly. Everything appeared normal on the small screen of the remote, both in thermal and night-vision modes.
Then somebody coughed within the shadows of the chamber, causing Faizan to fall to the floor in feigned sleep, though he kept one eye open. The dragonfly remained perched on the stone, unmoving. When he was sure that enough time had safely passed, Faizan sat up and continued his diagnostic examination of the drone. The laser stems that shot laser light to the surrounding structure like the walls, ceiling and floor to gauge height, width and distance of the tunnel system were also operable. He then checked the unit’s recorder, which was also functioning.
In the three days that he had been cloaked as a member of the Islamic State, Faizan didn’t waste any time to accruing data of their location, the tunnel system, and the dialogue that went on between Ahmed Ali and his lieutenants.
So far, however, there was no boon of information or anything that the principals could look at and say: ‘We can use this.’
Another cough within the tunnel system, this time further away. Nevertheless, Faizan hunkered down and waited. When he deemed the moment right, Faizan enabled the drone. Its wings fluttered into blinding vertical strokes and lifted off, first bobbing and weaving in flight before Faizan was able to guide it down the channel. The screen was small, about the size of an ice cube. But it recorded everything the drone was seeing in live time and relayed the images to a geospatial satellite above his location, which in turn sent the images directly to Langley.
The drone maneuvered through the network recording the number of ISIS soldiers lying on the ground in night-vision mode, their shapes showing lime green on the screen. On the bottom of the monitor was a series of numeric values that scrolled in blinding revolutions, and too fast for the eye to comprehend. These numbers then calculated the distance of the drone’s surroundings that were measured digitally in nanoseconds, with these calculations relayed immediately to Langley so that they could chart a virtual map of the entire tunnel system.
The tiny vehicle continued to fly silently down the tunnel, turning and weaving by the design of Henry Faizan’s control. As the tiny vehicle took a series of bends, the unit eventually came to the poorly lit chamber Faizan knew was Ahmed Ali’s.
Having switched off the night-vision capability, the drone hovered above a sizeable stone twenty feet from Ali and his two lieutenants, then dropped and perched itself to listen with its mic wide open.
* * *
Ahmed Ali and his lieutenants, Jamon Qadir and Mubarek Alfarsi, were standing within a bleary circle of light with Ali sitting upon an odd-shaped ston
e that served as his makeshift throne. Beyond the fringe of light were crates filled with firearms, ammo, MREs and bottles of water, the necessities for a revolutionary’s lifestyle.
Qadir and Alfarsi were both in their early 20s and heavily bearded. And like all ISIS hierarchy they sported the garments of their station, which was the ‘black suit’ of commanders. They also carried AK-47s, which hung across their backs diagonally.
Qadir, who was no taller than a twelve-year-old boy but had the spitfire viciousness of a Pit Bull, had to look up at his brethren whenever he spoke. “Tomorrow,” he began, “we’ll begin a regimental training. Those between fifteen and nineteen have a long way to go, much to learn.”
Ali nodded, as if pondering the remarks. Then: “Two months,” he said. “That’s when I’ll need them to be at their best. That’s when they need to be ready.”
“They will be, Ahmed. The motivation for them to be the best they can be will come down to those who train the hardest and become the most proficient in what they do. Those who fail to meet the full demands as a warrior will be pressed into suicide missions with Allah strong in their hearts. It’ll be a win-win process that divides the strong from the weak.”
