by Jones, Rick
He turned and looked downward, his limbs spread across the framework like an insect frozen while in the middle of scaling the wall.
“Get down here,” she ordered. “Now.”
He nodded. “If I don’t do something, then we will die. You know that.”
“Basilio, please.”
“Mama, if papa were here—”
“You’re not your father,” she interjected. But to Basilio it sounded more like a criticism, the tone of her words biting painfully deep. “Basilio, please. Even your father would not do this, if he was here. He would use better judgment.”
“Papa would never sit by and wait for his family to die.” He turned and began to climb, one hand over the other, his feet finding the ridge of the framing, and pushed himself upward.
“Basilio, please.” Now she sounded desperate. “Basilio!”
At the top he placed the flat of his palm against the tin sheets and tested its weight by pushing. Nothing, the piled sheets were too heavy. So he moved to his left, and then to his right, testing, pushing, looking for a weakness, finding nothing. Watching him carefully with her hands nervously fisted against her chest, his mother realized the futility of her appeals.
At the rear edge of the wall, when a tin sheet lifted beneath his efforts, Basilio hesitated as if caught off guard. A moment later he lifted the tin sheet, his arm and shoulder straining with effort, the cords of his neck sticking out, as he carefully lifted and deposited the sheet to a point that gave him marginal access to slip through.
Looking down at his mother, he assured her would return with help before the sun was up.
“Basilio, please. They’ll kill you.” Tears were streaking down her cheeks, the courses of wetness shining silver from the minimal light filtering through the hole.
“Please, Mama, you know I have to do this.”
Reluctantly, she nodded. Another rites-of-passage for a boy becoming a man, she considered. She just didn’t think she would have to let go of him so soon.
Quietly, Basilio was through the access and gone. And then there were the slight footfalls traversing along the metal sheets overhead before they disappeared.
Basilio was on foot.
#
Kimball was strapped to the armrests of a seat in the rear of the plane by common plastic ties, not flexcuffs. Flexcuffs needed cutters to free the subject because escape was virtually impossible. Plastic ties, on the other hand, were far more doable to break or bend or squeeze through since they were the industrial ties used to bind the trash bags after a commercial flight. Nevertheless, the ties that bound him were cinched so tight they chafed the flesh around his wrists until the pins-and-needles effect raced along both arms. The blood flow was becoming stymied.
To his left, buckled into his seat across the aisle, was his captor, a man with hardened features and eyes as black as a midnight sky. The man did not register Kimball at all. He merely sat with his eyes forward as the plane ascended at a thirty-five degree angle.
With his opposing hand that was shielded from the view of his guard, Kimball began to work the wrist of his right hand to break the binding tie. But the tie did not break or give. In fact, the industrial ties turned out to be a high-grade quality, which concerned Kimball. The pins-and-needles effect was dramatically increasing, meaning the blood flow of fresh oxygenation was decreasing. Soon his muscles would weaken and desist function altogether, rendering his limbs useless.
Immediately he began to flex the fingers of both hands, trying to stimulate blood flow. It was not working, his arms starting to take on that “falling asleep” effect. And then he worked his right wrist against the sharp edges of the tie, slicing the flesh, his blood providing a lubricant.
He continued to work his wrist back and forth, cutting, chaffing, slicing, red rivulets running and soaking into the fabric of the cushioned armrest. And then he began to torque his hand in such a way that the motion of trying to free himself nearly cost his flesh to peel back in a sickening avulsion. But Kimball had no choice. His limbs were growing weaker, the muscles starving for oxygen.
In an effort to free himself Kimball pulled back and his blood-slicked hand slipped free. Immediately he could feel the blood rushing back into his hand, which had grown cold and blue, as well as the accompanying heat that coursed through every minuscule fiber and nerve ending.
The problem was he still had one hand to go, a hand that was beginning to blacken under the constraints of the tie—his left hand, which was within his captor’s eyeshot.
If seen, Kimball chanced a bullet to the brain. But then again, Kimball determined he was marked for death anyway.
They all were.
He knew he needed to make a move and make it quick.
And then it happened.
Instead of making a move, the move made him.
#
The moment Kimball slipped his hand free of the binding tie, Shepherd One achieved a milestone: It had reached the point of no return.
The plane ascended at a constant grade and reached a level of twenty-four thousand feet, the atmospheric pressure reaching 5.45 pounds-per-square inch, when the pressure at sea level is 14.7 pounds-per-square inch. The moment Shepherd One reached the twenty-five-thousand-foot level, then the altimeters in the payloads would sense the radical pressure change, and initiate a one-time signal to the mother boards that would immediately recognize the additional memory space used, and engage the nuclear weaponry as ‘activated.’ Adversely, however, once Shepherd One reached the descending altitude of ten thousand feet, the altimeters would again measure the change in atmospheric pressure, recognize the conditions of the new altitude change, and begin to deliberately shut themselves off. Once the mother board recognizes the shutoff connection and sudden loss of memory, the devices would, by program design, acknowledge the immediate change, and detonate within a nanosecond of the shut-off point.
In the cockpit, as the aircraft rose, Hakam never took his eyes off the cockpit altimeter. The moment the aircraft reached 25,000 feet, he visualized the weapons activation, could sense them being born.
And in all his praises to Allah, he never felt so complete or contented.
Al-Khatib Hakam, born in Dearborn, Michigan, had succeeded.
And in his mind’s eye he could imagine what was going on one level below him.
In the cargo bay the payloads began to whine in a high-pitch resonance, the computers accepting the sudden immergence of its online resuscitation before tapering off to a mild hum. If Shepherd One should ever fall below the ten-thousand-foot mark, then the payloads would go off in a six-kiloton flash of white-hot fire and devastation.
Shepherd One was rigged to never land again.
And al-Khatib Hakam was pleased.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Perugia, Italy.
Basilio was wrong.
After jumping to the concrete landing from the height of his holding cell, he landed in the shadows out of view of a guard, who sat beneath the cone of feeble light cast from a bulb that dangled from a length of chain. The man appeared to be sleeping, his eyes closed. But when the man raised his hand to scratch the skin hidden beneath a heavy thatch of bearded growth along his chin, he knew the guard was only resting.
With his heart hammering against the rack of his ribs and his blood throbbing against the temples of his skull, Basilio moved quietly down the corridor and away from the guard.
At the end of corridor was a stairwell, which led to a massive room that had once been an assembly line of a major plant. Old antiquated machinery still marked the floors as rusted hulks too cumbersome to move and not worth salvaging. Overhead, the ceiling held myriad holes, some gaping from where it caved in, the broken pieces lying scattered across the floor as rotted chunks of wood, plaster and glass. The plant had been abandoned for decades.
Oh no!
Through the gaping holes he saw patches of blue from a daytime sky. What he thought would be the shelter of darkness was not. He had simply misjudge
d his timing by relying on his barometric sense, thinking that low humidity meant night. It was simply a cool day.
Basilio kept his head on a swivel, moving from one shadow to the next, often seeking the cover of dead machinery.
From above the birds alit quietly on the overhead beams, watching. Everyone once in a while one would lift its wing and preen itself. But they mostly studied Basilio without sentiment.
And then it occurred to him: The plant was too quiet. One would think that in an area so large voices would surely carry or footfalls would echo.
But there was nothing.
Suddenly the birds took flight and landed on a neighboring beam, as if to acquire a better view. The unexpected noise of their wings flapping caused Basilio to start.
Immediately he looked up, looked at the birds, and then felt the cold muzzle of an assault weapon pressing against the base of his skull.
“Stand up,” the voice said. It was deep and menacing. “Or I will kill you right where you kneel. It’s your choice, kid.”
Basilio no longer hunkered behind the colossal machinery, but slowly got to his feet raising his hands in submission. He had failed his family, his father. Now he had failed himself.
“Turn around.”
Basilio did so, slowly, his eyes on the verge of tears as his mind raced with the terrible thought of his life coming to an end.
The man holding the weapon was large and extremely muscular; his shirt threatening to split at the seams. His features were monkey-like with a broad, flat nose, and a brow that sloped in a simian sort of way. “Yeah, well, nice try, kid.” Al-Rashad then struck Basilio hard across the face and split his lip, the blow driving Basilio to the floor. Then in a quick and fluid motion, al-Rashad reached down and ripped the shirt right off of the boy’s back.
#
She had been ringing her hands since Basilio left and paced the room like a caged feline. If she had the athleticism, grace or agility, she would have climbed after him and brought him back down.
Even if Basilio was trying to find himself, she would not have allowed him to take such a risk.
The lock in the door began to click, the noise reverberating throughout the room as the bolt began to retract.
A large man with incredibly broad shoulders and massive arms had to duck to enter the room. In his hands was a bloodied shirt; Basilio’s shirt.
Saying nothing, the man tossed the shirt in her face and left the room, the lock moving back into position after the door closed.
She could smell the scent of her son on the shirt; feel the wetness of fresh blood.
And in agony that was all consuming, Vittoria Pastore cried out in a horrible wail that echoed throughout the entire plant.
#
Kimball hardly determined the matter to be that of divine intervention. He simply chalked it up to one man’s panic.
In one of the forwarding rows, a bishop from the Holy See began to cry nonsensically, his words a rambling series of pleas to God as he tried to leave his seat with a disturbing preoccupation to his eyes, not realizing what he was doing. Other bishops reached up and tried to force him back down. But the bishop’s ramblings became more intense, more agitated, which brought the ire of the Muslim Revolutionary Front, who raised their weapons and ordered the man to take a seat or take a bullet.
When the bishop did not obey the screams of the terrorists heightened, as if their sharp inflections would have more affect. They did not. The bishop moved along the seats mumbling, his eyes totally detached from reality, his lips crying out ‘why’ and ‘how’ this could be happening. Why was such a pious man as he being punished? Did he not live by the Lord’s doctrines?
Immediately, the Muslim Revolutionary Front gathered around the bishop, including the one guarding Kimball, with their Glocks directed on the panicked man. With intensity they cried out in Arabic, their orders going unheeded as alarm began to set. The bishop tried to scale his seat in order to get to the rear of Shepherd One, away from the terrorists and their guns, away from reality and toward a false sense of salvation.
With one leg looped over the back of the seat, the bishop managed to fall over into the subsequent row, and then scrambled for the next seat to mount. The man was getting closer to the plane’s rear the hard way. The moment he raised his head he was bludgeoned, his world going dark, his lips silenced, the bishop rendered unconscious with a blow from the barrel of a Glock.
After the bishop was secured, the guard who had been watching over Kimball returned to his seat at the rear of the plane. However, when he got there Kimball was gone. The only things left in his place were a tie left on the seat, and a bloodied tie still attached to the armrest.
#
After Kimball Hayden freed himself from his binds, he immediately went aft to the kitchen area. To his right, next the door of the wine vault was the elevator. Although narrow for the wide breadth of his shoulders, Kimball managed to fit inside and pushed the button to the lower level of L-1, trying to form an agenda in his mind.
For his entire life he had always been in control, always knew which direction he wanted to go in. But there was no military text, outline, or step-by-step directions describing how to take out a group of terrorists on a plane leveled at thirty-three thousand feet.
At L-1 he found himself in a well-stocked pantry, and then locked the elevator in place. At the small stainless steel sink he ran his injured wrist under tepid water, the blood diluting to a pinkish fluid as it spiraled down the drain. Flexing his fingers and massaging his wrist, he could feel the warmth returning, the effects of pins-and-needles subsiding. Soon he would have full mobility of his hand.
After shutting off the water, he placed his hands on the sink and leaned forward with his eyes closed, his mind trying to find a way to neutralize the situation. There was no doubt they would come looking for him. And no doubt he would be ready. He had counted six able men who were armed. He on the other hand had nothing but his combat skills, which would take him far. But in the end he would be no match against a hollow point, if one should find its mark.
Leaving the pantry area, Kimball found himself standing before a flimsy door that led to the baggage area. It was locked. So with a powerful forward thrust of his left hand, he struck the door and broke the latch, causing the door to hang drunkenly from a single hinge.
Inside the cargo bay marginal light filtered in through the porthole windows, illuminating the baggage area which seemed impossibly long, given that he was standing in the jet’s aft area looking forward. Stepping into the hold, Kimball found himself with ample space. Reaching up, he could not touch the floor of the level above him. On both sides he had the wide expanse of the airplane. The problem was that it was too ample, too wide open, leaving little place to hide with the exception of a few tethered crates and strewn baggage. The entire level was simply too hollow and possessed few shadows to hide in. Perhaps on the lower level, he thought, perhaps on L-2, he could make a stand against his enemies.
He quickly made his way through the luggage hold and callously tossed aside some bags, searching for his own. On the bottom of the pile he found what he was looking for, a specifically modified piece of luggage with a molded interior to safely keep his hardware safe. Beneath his clothing, beneath the cleric shirts and Roman collars, was a false bottom that held his specially designed pair of black-bladed KA-BAR combat knives and Kydex sheaths.
Since coming into the combat ranks Kimball was always known as the silent assassin; a man who killed with stealth. For more than twenty years he remained at the top of his game by continuously honing his skills. Like Tai Chi, which can possess up to 108 moves, Kimball incorporated a set of 230 moves in a single exercise, teaching defensive and offensive techniques, mental balance, and oneness with his inner Chi. As one of the best in the world in double-edged weapons and combat engagement, it was important for Kimball to maintain his performance and mentor his team of Vatican Knights, so they can be the best the world could offer.
Removing the knives and sheaths, Kimball strapped a bladed weapon to each thigh like a gunslinger would strap on a holster. The handles felt good in his grip, the motions of the blades cutting through air in graceful arcs were artistic in its nature and aesthetic to the eye. The adage of ‘poetry in motion’ was a perfect assessment of Kimball’s skill, as he handled the weapons so fluidly it was hypnotic. With his mind focused and eyes forward, he sheathed the knives by slipping them into their thin slots, and slid them into place.
Kimball Hayden was now in his element.
After locking his suitcase, Kimball began to move forward to investigate the fuselage to get a better feel for his surroundings, noting every niche and shadow, anything that would give him the advantage of knowing his terrain better than his enemy. When he came upon a couple of tethered crates he also noticed the two aluminum cases situated between them. At first he ignored them and pressed forward, taking careful measures with his forward advancement until he heard a sudden whine and pitch coming from behind him.
Immediately his hands came to fall on the handles of his combat knives, ready for a quick draw. And then he listened, intently, his chin cocked forward as he quietly turned on the balls of his feet trying to gauge where the sound was coming from, the pitch and whine vacillating in tone, and slowly followed the pull of the noise to the two aluminum cases.
By the time he got there the sound was barely perceptible, a slight ringing, and then gone. Getting to a knee, he gingerly traced his hand over the cover of the first case, in an almost loving stroke, and found the shell to be cold to the touch.
Undoing the clasps, he carefully lifted the cover and exposed the three burnished spheres. Leaving the cover up, Kimball opened the second case, with far less caution and no hesitancy on his part, by yanking the lid upward.
There, lined side by side, an additional three spheres.
Leaving the tops open, Kimball fell onto his backside and sat there.
