by Rene Fomby
“Just waiting on you two sissies,” said the voice in his ear. “Alpha’s got two guys ready to blow the back door as soon as you two stop chatting and haul your lazy butts out of there.”
“Okay, Alpha, here we come.” Jack gave his captive one final punch between her shoulder blades. “And we got a guest with us, so make sure to put out some fresh towels and soaps for her.”
“Her? You got Tulley’s daughter?”
“No, Tulley and his pretty little girl weren’t at the party, so we picked up a go-go dancer instead.” And judging by how those soldiers reacted when they saw her on the elevator with us, she may turn out to be quite useful in her own right. Quite useful, indeed. “Coming through the door now. Get ready to huff, puff, and blow that little door down.”
“Will do, little pigs. Big Bad Wolf, over and out.”
100
USS Carl Vinson
Alpha Team had the little tram in the escape tunnel up and running when Jack, Booker and their prisoner arrived, so after setting the fuse for the explosives, they took off at high speed toward the exit, just ahead of the blast wave echoing from the tunnel collapse right on their heels.
Once outside, they saw that the storm had already begun to move off toward the east, revealing a thick blanket of stars in the jet-black moonless sky, so they loaded up thankfully into the last of the little birds and took off for the five-hundred-mile return trip back to the Carl Vinson.
Sam was waiting for them when the last of the little aircraft finally touched down safely.
“Is everyone okay?” she asked nervously as Jack stepped out onto the flight deck, pulling his combative prisoner out of the little Gnat behind him and handing her off to one of the Alpha Team commandos before turning back toward Sam with a goofy grin.
“Yeah, we made it in and out without too many problems.” He hooked a thumb toward Booker, who was already being tended to by a medic. “One of my boys on Bravo team ran into a little bee’s nest back on the second floor and got himself stung, but it’s nothing a little iodine and a kiss from a pretty girl can’t fix. Can’t say the same about the bee’s nest, though.” He stopped for a second to look around. “More importantly, how’s the girl? How did Andy Patterson make out?” Jack had received a short radio report en route that everyone had made it back safely, but no real details. They had opted to keep radio chatter to a minimum until they were well clear of Turkish airspace.
The medic examining Booker’s arm looked up. “She’s pretty weak, but she’ll do okay. Says they were pretty much starving her to death up until a few days ago, when they suddenly started feeding her again for some inexplicable reason. Other than that, we couldn’t find any serious injuries or other medical problems, so she should recover completely in a few days. At least recover physically, that is.”
That was news Sam had waited a very long time to hear. “Thank God for that! And I’m sure she’ll do fine mentally, as well. According to Gavin, Andy’s one tough broad.” Sam’s thoughts now completely shifted toward Gavin. If Andy’s rescue had meant this much to her, she couldn’t imagine what he must be feeling right about now.
Jack started peeling equipment off his back, waist and face, handing them off to a sailor who was packing it all into black mesh bags. “Charlie Team tells me they recovered a shitload of intel from the server room, so other than failing to locate Tulley, I’d say the whole operation was an unqualified success.”
“Yeah, other than that one qualification, it was,” Sam noted with a laugh. “But you at least got one prisoner out of the deal, that crazy woman. What was she speaking? French?”
“I think so.” Jack looked back over his shoulder, where several sailors were still struggling to get her though a hatch, on her way down to the brig. “And I have high hopes for that one. The fact that she was allowed in Tulley’s private office, alone, that whole uniform thing, the way Tulley’s soldiers reacted when they saw her—”
“But do you think she’ll talk?” Sam asked, watching the scene at the hatch with concern.
“Can’t be sure,” Jack answered. “But we’ve put together a little cocktail that historically has been amazingly effective at putting folks like that in a better—mood, let’s say—so hopefully if we can get her drunk enough she’ll start spilling at least a few beans. Especially if we can find something on those servers to confront her with. Look.” He wiped a sheen of sweat off his forehead. “I need to go get cleaned up. I smell like I’ve been rolling around in pig shit all night. Why don’t we all give it thirty and then meet up to sort things out while everything’s still fresh in our minds?”
“Sounds like a good idea,” she agreed. And yes, you really could use a shower right about now.
※
Gavin was standing beside Andy in sick bay, watching, as they hooked up an IV drip and clamped an O2 meter on her left index finger. He was kind of glad they didn’t have any monitors clamped onto him—even after everything she’d just been through, just the sight of her made his blood run fast.
“Is all of this really necessary?” Andy complained. “I’d really prefer a nice double-patty bacon cheeseburger and a pile of fried onion rings right about now.”
“Don’t worry, Andy, I’ll be sure you get them, just as soon as the docs are done checking you out. You’ve been through quite an ordeal, you know.” Gavin leaned over to push a lock of Andy’s hair back in place behind her ear.
“Really? You think?” She reached up to squeeze his hand lightly. “Well, I guess it could have been worse. I don’t know why they were so insistent upon keeping me alive down there, at least when I first got there and they were still feeding me on a regular basis. Then they stopped for a while, and only restarted the meal schedule a few days ago. I heard several of the guards joking that they were fattening me up for when Boucher got back.”
Gavin’s face went white. “You mean—”
“Yeah, I think he had similar plans for me like what he pulled on Samantha a few months ago in Vegas. Boy, he must really be inadequate in the bedroom department, having to drug a girl half to death just to have a shot at getting lucky …”
“But he didn’t, did he? Nobody—”
“No, Gavin, I’m fine. They roughed me up a little at first, trying to get some info out of me on you, what you were up to, but I just told them what they evidently wanted to hear, and they let up. All lies, of course, but it’s what they want to hear that’s really critical in those kinds of situations. You’ve got to remember to stay creative.”
“Yeah, I’ve been on the receiving end of your—creativity—on more than one occasion, and you’re quite good at it. But Andy, one thing I was wondering about. Your analyst? There was only one other jail cell down there, and it was empty. What happened to the analyst? Did they kill him?”
Andy grimaced. “That little shit? No, he was working for Tulley and Boucher the whole time. He made up a whopper of a story about having a hot lead on Tulley in order to blindside me into that little ambush in Cairo. Even showed them how to disable and remove my tracking bracelet. You know about Cairo?”
Gavin nodded, squeezing her hand. “I guess I need to catch you up on a few things. Actually, on a whole lot of things.”
“Sure. I guess we’ll have plenty of time for that now. But, that other jail cell. The one that was empty?”
“Yeah?”
“They were holding a French woman and her children in there for a while, up until a few days ago. I was able to talk to her a little late at night, through the wall. When the guards weren’t paying attention. She said her husband was an American, a federal agent of some sort. They were holding his family there as a hostage for some reason.”
Mendez! So maybe Ramon wasn’t really a traitor after all. “Okay, that makes sense. They must have been using his wife and kids as leverage to get him to lead me into an ambush, and thankfully he did a piss-poor job on all that in the end. But—you said they left several days ago. Do you know what happened to them?”
&nb
sp; “No, I don’t really. I just woke up one morning and they were gone. Do you think Tulley had them killed?”
Gavin nodded, looking away. “Possibly. Probably. If so, it’d be just another bloody chapter from Tulley’s long history of death and destruction. But maybe now, at least, we’re finally coming to the end of that story. With his underground city now in our hands, Tulley no longer has any place to hide out. So I guess he may finally be at the end of the trail.”
“I hope you’re right about that, Gavin. I sure do hope you’re right. For everyone’s sake.”
Gavin checked his watch. “Andy, I can’t tell you how much I’d like to sit here and talk, all night long if you’re up to it, but I promised the extraction team I’d join them right about now for a quick debrief on the operation. And you need to rest, anyway.”
“All right, then, run along. But this time don’t ignore me for so long. Three whole weeks with not a single phone call? Really? A girl starts to wonder after a while, starts to imagine things, you know?”
“Well, to be honest, there’s only one thing I’ve been imagining for the past three weeks. And it’s this.” He leaned in and kissed her softly on the lips, lingering for a few long moments before finally and reluctantly breaking away. “Unfortunately, duty calls, my lady.”
She grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “They’ve waited this long, they can wait a few minutes more.” And this time she put everything she had into the kiss.
※
Gavin, Sam, Sanders and Commander Jack sat huddled closely around a small conference table, running through a quick debrief of the operation.
Gavin leaned forward, still smirking a bit from a little earlier. “Andy didn’t learn much, buried down in the basement the way she was, but she did catch a few snippets of a conversation where one of the guards claimed Mary Ellen Tulley had delivered a baby girl, a delivery they characterized supposedly as a virgin birth of some sort.”
“Really? The Virgin Mary? Now I’ve heard everything,” Sam spluttered.
Sanders rubbed his chin. “Hmmm. That may be crazy, but it’s consistent with what we picked up from the video broadcast. Tulley now claims to be a reincarnation of the Emperor Constantine, the Roman emperor who first legalized Christianity. Evidently he thinks he’s restoring the empire, with him at the head, and with the two halves of the old Roman Christian Church finally reunited as one.”
“That makes for a great fantasy, but even with all the money he stole from Sam’s family business, how in the world could he ever pull that off?” Gavin asked.
“Well, to start with, he’s already reunited the Church,” Sam pointed out. “And Rome and the entire southern half of Italy have now seceded from the Republic of Italy, at least on paper. So it wouldn’t be all that hard to see him try to seize control over the new southern government. Once he’s the head guy, then he can call himself—and the new country he’d be leading—anything he wants, I guess.”
Jack leaned back. “So what I’m hearing is, maybe he’s not so crazy, after all.” He turned toward Sanders, who was still rubbing his chin, lost in thought. “I guess that means he’s probably headed toward Italy, then, and we need to start planning for an all-out assault on Rome. Grab the rat bastard once and for all and drop his sorry ass into the North Atlantic like we did Bin Laden.”
Sanders looked up. “Yes, I suppose so. But something else doesn’t add up, here. Something from the video he broadcast to all his so-called churches, just before the zombie riots broke out.”
“Yeah, what was that?” Gavin asked.
“The location. The whole thing was shot, not in Rome, but in Istanbul. Inside the old Basilica Cistern, to be exact. And at the end, he said something about a New Rome rising.”
“Okay, that cinches it, then.” Gavin had brought a beer with him to the debriefing, and he paused to take a swig. “Old Rome has now become the New Rome, under the new government of southern Italy.”
“No, not exactly, Gavin.” A map of Turkey and the surrounding countries had been spread out before them, marked up in red ink to show the ingress and egress routes for the now-completed raid. Sanders reached over and tapped one spot on the left-hand side of the map. “You see, after the Romans moved their capital to old Byzantium in the early three hundreds, Constantine gave the city a new name. The locals started calling it Constantinople, or Constantine’s City. But the official name was always New Rome.”
101
Istanbul
A senior aide stepped up cautiously, stopping in front of the emperor and snapping to attention. “Sir, we’ve lost contact with the Eastern Palace back in Göreme. The computers, phones, everything’s down.”
Constantine grumbled at being bothered by such details. Not now, you fool. We have much bigger fish to fry tonight.
“Probably just the storm. Or a power failure.”
“But sir, we have battery backups—”
“Not now! We’ll worry about the old palace later. That place is not important, not anymore. It’s just ancient history, that’s all. The only thing that matters right now is our future.” He watched a timer clicking slowly down to zero on the flat screen monitor off to his right. Just a matter of minutes now.
102
Istanbul
It was nearly midnight as the two oil tankers surged almost as one toward the southern mouth of the Bosporus Strait. The traffic on the water was light, due to the time of day and the slowly dissipating effects of the powerful storm that had just left the area. It was a moonless night, and except for a few lingering, scudding clouds, the air was clear and cool, the stars shining like pinpricks of diamonds in the black sky above.
The Bosporus was equally as black, other than the occasional reflection of city lights bouncing off the waves. All in all, the city itself was quiet, almost everyone tucked safely into bed, the violence from the storm now well behind them.
As the two ships sailed forward, water was streaming from the sides and stern of the first ship as its bilge pumps struggled to empty its tanks of millions of gallons of ballast seawater. Empty of the extra dead weight, it rose higher and higher, its normal waterline now a full thirty feet above the surface of the water.
Just before entering the strait, the second tanker slowed and peeled aside, away from the restricted channel that boats were required to follow on their northbound and southbound routs, while the first tanker continued to plow straight ahead. After several hundred feet, though, even that ship slowed noticeably, starting a slow arcing turn toward the west. After ten minutes, with the ship’s turn finally complete, the captain signaled to the engine room, full steam ahead, and the tanker’s mighty engines roared back to life.
A young couple out for a midnight stroll along the Kennedy Caddesi roadway along the water’s edge watched with growing concern as the massive ship drove straight toward them while other, smaller boats scattered in its wake as it plowed through the turgid waters of the strait. Finally, with the tanker now almost upon them, the young man suddenly realized that the tanker wasn’t showing any signs of slowing or turning away. He grabbed his wife’s arm and pulled her southward toward safety just as fast as they could run, the young woman screaming in terror.
Behind them, the ship impacted the stone seawall at full speed, crushing the wall and flinging its prow up high onto the roadway, finally coming to rest against the twenty-foot-high stone and concrete fortifications that had recently been constructed around the Old City of Istanbul. Instantly a wide door opened in the prow and an enormous metal ramp extended outward, over the fortifications and down to the barren ground just inside the walls. Before the ramp extension was even complete, though, a long line of tanks and armored personnel carriers surged from the ship, rolling quickly across the ramp and landing with resounding thuds inside the walls of the Old City. Once on the ground, they turned briskly to the left and right, followed immediately by a wave of black-clad soldiers.
The young couple cringed fearfully against the plain gray concrete wall
lining this portion of Kennedy Cadessi as another, smaller ramp emerged, connecting the tanker with the south-bound portion of the road. More tanks and armored personnel carriers leapt from the ship across the ramp, followed by canvas-sided personnel carriers loaded to the gills with a black-clad invasion force. They raced off south and west toward the airport, ignoring the woman’s screams as they passed. The Battle for New Rome had finally begun.
a new rome rising
103
New Rome - Sunday
Constantine paced in front of the cameras, anxious to deliver his message before Turkey and the West could possibly react in force to what had happened overnight. Using the new city walls to full advantage—walls the Turks had constructed just a year earlier to safeguard tourists and, more importantly, provide a handy way to control any anti-government protests—his soldiers had neutralized the sleeping Turkish police force with minimal casualties, locking them up for the time being in their own cells. Only a handful of the local police had tried to mount any kind of resistance to the invasion, but they quickly abandoned even that pretense when faced with the overwhelming firepower of Constantine’s tanks, mortars and rocket propelled grenade launchers. And, of course, zombie attacks from Tulley’s drug-addled acolytes added an extra element of chaos to the evening.
The main bridges over the Bosporus to the Asian side of Istanbul had been blown, along with the Eurasian Tunnel stretching underneath the Bosporus, and without any military support the airport fell almost instantly. Disabling the Turkish 3rd Corp had taken a little more effort, but a rapidly deployed nerve agent made quick work of even that token defense. Now Constantine just needed to unveil his biggest weapon, one that would keep the Turkish and NATO armies at bay for good.
