Pandora's Ark (Vatican Knights)

by Jones, Rick

  The second team at the second MG nest was not as lucky. The Quds team was alert and responsive with their eyes cast forward with the point of the Browning poised to kill. Since the Knights had little opportunity to approach their position, they had no choice but to extinguish them with well-placed shots to neutralize the situation.

  Within three minutes both nests were cleared and the landing secured. All that remained was to breach the facility and acquire the Ark. And they had to do it while fending off an elite force.

  Kimball stood by the massive vault door leading into the facility and placed the flat of his palm against the cold steel.

  His pulse began to race.

  The firefight was about to begin.

  #

  Negev Desert on the Western Outskirts of Beersheba, Hatzerim Israeli Air Force Base

  At 1930 hours an order was mandated by the Prime Minister to initiate a sortie against an unchartered facility located in the Alborz Mountain region, most notably Mount Damavand. The precise coordinates were given and an aerial raid was to commence and end with the complete and total destruction of the facility.

  No reason was given for the strike. And no questions were asked.

  A dozen F-16I Israeli fighter jets were loaded with heavy payloads, the pilots instructed to terminate the target with such precision that it would take years for the dust to settle.

  Lining up on the tarmac the planes took off in timed succession, approximately thirty seconds apart until all the jets were airborne and heading toward Mount Damavand.

  In the Prime Minister’s office, as Netanyahu watched his monitor and saw the planes take off, he could sense the heaviness of an oncoming war settling over him like a pall.

  #

  Turkey/Iranian Border, Vatican Base Command

  The SIV, in collusion with the Turkish government, had set up a post on the Turkey side of the border less than five miles from the Iranian boundary line.

  Father Essex was manning the Comm Center, a makeshift camp erected with canvas tents and expensive electronic equipment. The flaps blew wildly with the course of a brutal wind, the heat lamps doing little to abate the chill from his bones, as he monitored feeds coming from the SIV Center at the Vatican, which was helmed by Father Auciello.

  Other SIV officials milled about, monitoring radar display screens and intercepted radio chat from the Ukraine to Iran to Israel to the United States, compiling detailed information as world events pressed on. One event in particular emerged from Israel. Apparently the powers that be had ordered an illegal incursion into Iran with the objective to take out a target located at the base of Mount Damavand.

  Father Essex knew exactly what Israel’s intent was. Nor did he hesitate to act. He inquired another SIV operative as to the current location of the strike team in flight. The news was not good. When the coordinates were finally given, Father Essex put on his headgear, typed in a command to initiate communication, and spoke into his lip mike. “Romeo-One, this is Base Command. Do you copy?”

  #

  The pilot of the Chinook sat idle in the valley below, waiting, until he received word from Father Essex at the Vatican Base Command which was posted at the Turkey/Iranian border.

  “Romeo-One, this is Base Command. Do you copy?”

  The pilot spoke into his lip mike. “This is Romeo-One. Go ahead.”

  “Romeo-One, you need to contact Team Leader Bravo and inform him that IDF has launched their eagles and are heading toward the precision point with an ETA of thirty minutes. Do you copy?”

  The pilot looked at his synchronized watch. Thirty minutes? There wasn’t enough time for Kimball to pull off the mission, he considered. Not nearly enough.

  “Base Command, do you want me to abort the mission and pull the team?”

  “That’s negative, Romeo-One. You need to contact Team Leader Bravo and apprise him of the situation.”

  “Copy that, Base Command. . . Out.”

  The pilot shook his head. Those men, he knew, if they didn’t get out now, were as good as dead.

  He tapped a button on his headgear. “Romeo-One to Team Leader Bravo. Come in, Team Leader Bravo . . .”

  #

  Kimball stood back from the vault when his ear bud went off. “Romeo-One to Team Leader Bravo. Come in, Team Leader Bravo . . .”

  “This is Team Leader Bravo. Go ahead.”

  “I just got word from Base Command that IDF has launched eagles and are bearing down with an ETA of thirty.”

  Thirty minutes?

  “Copy that, Romeo-One.”

  “You want me to start evacuation process?”

  “Negative. Stand by and wait for my command.”

  “Copy that.”

  Kimball appeared worried—something Leviticus never thought he’d see on the Vatican Knight’s face. So he had to ask. “What’s the matter?”

  Kimball turned to him. “It appears that Israel is committing to a preemptive strike quicker than we planned.”

  “You’re telling me that they’re in flight?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  “How long?”

  “Thirty minutes.”

  “That’s cutting it close, Kimball.”

  “I agree.” Kimball then walked toward Ezra—whose exclusive skill and purpose was setting explosive charges for maximum effect—with urgency to his gait. “Ezra, we need to get inside ASAP.”

  Ezra sized up the door. “I can place explosives against the wall, which is approximately three-feet thick, the same as the door. It’ll take three, maybe four discharges before we breach the facility.”

  “How long to set them off?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “You have five. Get us in there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kimball fell back to access the situation only to be met by Leviticus, who grabbed him by the crook of the elbow and pulled him into close counsel. “We’re cutting it close, Kimball. I say we cut our losses and blow the facility before their jets rain down on us. At least we can keep Israel from committing themselves to a situation with serious ramifications.”

  “We have thirty minutes,” he told him. “We can be well on our way to Turkey in twenty.”

  Leviticus released him. “You do realize that the Quds aren’t exactly going to let us walk right in and take the Ark, right? You know that, don’t you?”

  “Leviticus, this is what we’re all about. Is it not? Is this not why we are Vatican Knights?”

  Leviticus stood motionless, considering, and then he nodded. “Twenty minutes,” he said.

  “That’s all I ask. If we’re not in possession of the Ark by then, then we’ll bug out and destroy the facility.”

  “Agreed.”

  Both men turned toward Ezra who placed a packet of Semtex to the right of the door and against the stone wall. It was Ezra’s thought that blowing through concrete was the more expedient way than trying to breach the steel of the vault door.

  “All right, boys,” he said, activating the detonator. “It’s time to make some noise.” And then: “Cover!”

  Kimball looked at his watch: twenty-seven minutes to go. Do it!

  Ezra pressed the command, setting off the Semtex. The explosion was massive as rock and debris went everywhere. When the dust settled a gaping hole the size of a small entryway was situated beside the vault door, the door itself was blackened and charred, but held nary a dent.

  The team examined the break and saw that it blew inwards of nearly two feet. As far as Kimball could tell it was a great mining tool, but they were still outside the facility and time was running short.

  Twenty-five minutes.

  “One, maybe two more charges,” said Ezra. “But I’ll get us in.”

  Kimball looked skyward, could almost hear the approaching jets.

  No doubt the explosion alerted the Quds inside, causing them to side up in defense formation.

  “How much Semtex you got left?” he asked.

  �
��Two bundles.”

  “Use them both as one discharge,” he told him.

  “That’s a lot of power, sir.”

  “Ezra, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Use them both. We’re running out of time.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ezra worked quickly, piecing the explosives as a unit of one. Since Semtex was one of the most volatile explosives ever created, the blowout would be massive. After setting the charges, Ezra cautioned the team to fall way back.

  Twenty-two minutes.

  “Cover!” He pressed the button. The stone wall, the world, the ground beneath them, all shook with apocalyptic reverberations that seemed never-ending as cloying dust as thick as a London fog circled in lazy eddies, refusing to settle.

  But through that fog they could see the light within the complex. The center had been breached.

  “MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!”

  Kimball led the way with his MP-5 directed front and center, the mouth of the weapon’s barrel poised to kill. He easily breached the hole, which was massive, the force of the explosion blowing hot chunks of rock throughout the center with scalpel-like intensity, the energy of the blast causing the stones to act as shrapnel that destroyed everything in its path perforating the walls with numerous holes. If Quds forces had been standing at the end of the corridor waiting in defense, then they would have been cut down to pieces, their bodies’ most likely ending up as tangled masses of freshly sliced meat.

  But no one was there.

  The lab was empty.

  The complex completely evacuated.

  Whatever machines that once filled the center were now gone.

  Kimball lowered his weapon, slowly, as if dismayed by his surroundings.

  The entire facility had bugged out, leaving a minimal force behind for cosmetics. Most likely as an excuse to use their deaths against the sortie that was coming. Iran was bracing itself for war. And Israel was falling right into the spider’s web.

  Eighteen minutes.

  “There’s nothing here!” yelled Leviticus. “We have to go!”

  “Check the facility for the Ark,” yelled Kimball. “We still have time. Just keep your head on a swivel, just in case!”

  The Vatican Knights branched out, their weapons at eye level as they moved along the corridors clearing the way.

  With the exception of a single broken monitor that was lying on its side, the lab was completely hollow. The only telltale sign that anything existed at all were the scuff marks along the tiled floor indicating that something of volume had once stood in its place. To the left was another chamber. And when Kimball entered he knew immediately that this was the chamber that housed the Ark of the Covenant.

  And like everything else, it was gone.

  “That’s it,” he finally said. “We’re done! Everybody out!”

  The Knights quickly banded together, exited the facility, and raced for the high ground of the helipad.

  Kimball spoke into his mike. “Romeo-One, this is Team Leader Bravo! Do you copy?”

  “Copy, Team Leader Bravo.”

  “Get that chopper to the extraction point now!”

  “Copy!”

  #

  The jets were zeroing in on their target and less than fifteen minutes out.

  In Tehran, as expected, they were picked up on radar, a blatant and illegal incursion into Iranian airspace which drew immediate condemnation from Iranian officials. In response Iran immediately sent their jets to retaliate, knowing full well that they were too far away to engage the enemy. But the retaliatory action was for cosmetics to show the world that Iran was well within its rights to protect itself as a sovereign country against the Zionist state of Israel.

  Of course they demanded that the Israeli’s turn back.

  And of course the demand went unheeded.

  When the sortie team was less than ten minutes away from their strike point, the world once again erupted in a fiery blast that sent a mushroom flame high above Mount Damavand.

  #

  The two men at the MG nest were quickly gathered by Kimball’s team and ushered to the helipad. By the time they got there the Chinook was landing, the rotors kicking up a wash of dust. As the door opened, the Quds were tossed inside.

  “What are you going to do with them?” asked the pilot.

  “If we leave them here, they’ll die. We’ll let them go at the border,” said Kimball.

  “And the Ark?”

  Kimball nodded.

  Once the rest of the team boarded, Kimball signaled to the pilot to get the bird going.

  The rotors quickened, and then the chopper lifted, hovering, then banked and headed north toward Turkey.

  “All right, Ezra!” Kimball had to yell over the thrumming of the blades. “Light her up!”

  Ezra typed his fingers furiously against the touch screen of an iPhone, the last tap having emphasis. A signal was sent through cyberspace and the charges on the fuel cells went off in synchronized succession starting from left to right, the cells bursting like dominoes and sending a fiery plume skyward, the cavern collapsing upon itself. A concussion wave then moved through the air at a rate of speed faster that the chopper could travel, tossing it violently from side to side in seesaw fashion before the pilot was able to regain control. Once the Chinook was stabilized, they then headed for Turkey.

  #

  At the moment of the explosion two things happened: First, the Israeli sortie was ordered to return to base—the precision point of attack, for whatever reason, had been terminated for reasons unknown. Secondly, the Iranian leadership could not figure out why the facility destructed prematurely when the sortie was ten minutes out. So when the Israeli’s headed back, the Iranian government saved face by puffing out their chest and sent forth a declaration remarking that the sortie retreated due to the advancement of their own intercepting forces. Therefore, the Israeli’s did not want to confront a superior power.

  Israel, of course, scoffed at this.

  But in the end war was averted.

  #

  When the Chinook landed on the Turkish side of the border, and as the two Quds were ushered to an unknown point within the Comm Center camp, Kimball entered the tent where Father Essex sat behind the Comm console watching high-definition monitors.

  Kimball grabbed his beret and tossed it roughly against the console in disappointment. “They bugged out,” he said. “They knew they were compromised, so they set up a neat little package to draw the fly to the honey,” he said tersely. “But they were expecting Israel to make a strike, not us.”

  “It would have been the catalyst necessary to justify war,” said Father Essex casually. “Israel would have made accusations regarding weapons of mass destruction. And Ahmadinejad would have denied everything. So the mission wasn’t without its merits . . . Even if the Ark is still missing.”

  Kimball took a seat as his anger rushed through him as quickly as the beat of his own pulse, hard and fast. In his heart he knew he was within reach, perhaps by hours, only for the Ark to slip through his fingers, most likely under the cover of darkness when the satellites were at their weakest point of visual perception.

  Kimball then leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and tried to relax. But he would not find the comfort necessary to pacify him until he returned to the Vatican on the following day.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Tehran, Iran, Warehouse District, Two Days After the Assault on The Facility

  In the Warehouse District in southern Tehran, al-Ghazi stood alongside al-Sherrod and other personnel who milled about a stockroom the size of a football field. The massive area was vacant, the surrounding floor, for the most part, littered with debris and rubble, the building having been abandoned long ago. Pigeons alighting on the overhead beams continued to pass their droppings to the floor. And the windows, which lined the top tier just below the roofline, were oxidized, cracked or broken. In the center of the warehouse was a raised platform surrounded by lights powered by generators. On
the center of that platform lay the Ark of the Covenant, its lid off and to the side, a gold aura fanning out from its shell against the cast of the reflecting light.

  Al-Ghazi stood back with his hands clasped behind the small of his back and watched his team rig the Ark with a false bottom.

  Before leaving the facility at Mount Damavand, Sakharov’s techs had engineered a flat box made of a composite not detectable by x-ray, and then infused it with nanobots. The flat box, approximately covering the entire floorboard of the Ark and an inch high, would be undetectable once the false bottom was set in place. Pinprick holes unseen by the naked eye would perforate the false flooring. The holes appearing like gaping chasms to the bots, since a hundred thousand could fit on the head of a pin, thereby providing numerous escape routes once the sound waves stimulated the bots into action.

  They would then take flight and devour anything organic within a fifteen minute period, killing without impunity, conscience and simply by design.

  Al-Ghazi watched as his engineers carefully laid the flat box containing the nanobots along the floor of the Ark, then fitted the false bottom over it so that the interior appeared uniform and untouched. In further examination they passed scopes and wands capable of detecting alien composites not existing at the time the Ark was created. This was done so as not to draw suspicion from scholars examining the Ark, and then warranting further scrutiny should they detect anomalous blends not historically existing at that time, such as the composite structure of the flat box, which was the last thing al-Ghazi wanted. X-rays were then taken from every angle, the nano container and false bottom going undetected, the bots all but invisible.

  Al-Ghazi was pleased.

  “Should the initial run succeed, Ahmad, then you will be cast in history as a savior.” Al-Sherrod smiled with his little, yellow teeth.