A Pius Man_A Holy Thriller

by Declan Finn

  “Figlia is up on the roof providing cover fire,” Hashim Abasi added, firing several rounds around his end of the van.

  “This is a Vatican security car, yes?” Shushurin asked. “Back at the Spanish Steps, you had all sorts of things. Can we use any of them?”

  McGrail and Abasi shared a glance, and smiled.

  * * *

  The civilians swarmed the airport, running in terror of Ioseph’s weapons. People ran every which way, as long as it wasn’t into Ioseph’s path. He would have laughed if he had the time, or breath, to spare.

  He rounded the corner, into a whole new situation — the crowd had fled from him, yes, but they had given advance warning to other people in the airport.

  Ioseph cursed — this problem came from the Israeli airline terminal: two El Al air marshals had apparently been awaiting their next flight.

  And like all Israeli air marshals, they had Uzi submachine guns.

  “Everyone down!” they shouted.

  Ioseph dropped to the ground in a roll, firing as he went. He expended all the bullets in his pistols, winging and wounding six different bystanders, but precisely hitting the mark more than enough to drop both the marshals. He spun, watching Sean Ryan come around the corner, and hurled both guns at him like throwing stars. The former stuntman dodged them ably, but it slowed him down for a split second — more than enough time for Mikhailov to sweep up the two fallen Uzis. As the Russian whirled around, Sean leapt back the way he had come, behind the corner.

  Mikhailov fired once, a simple burst, just to increase the panic, but then kept running — otherwise he would be completely exposed in the middle of the hall, relying solely on the varying paths of civilians to act as human shields.

  * * *

  Sean Ryan waited a breath, and then the communications earpiece sounded. “He’s gone,” Wilhelmina Goldberg told him from the security control center, watching Mikhailov run through the airport via the cameras.

  “The bastard’s trying to go for another way out,” Murphy added, also from the control center.

  “You mean they have a back door to an airport?” Sean muttered, getting back to his feet, charging out into the corridor. “Do I have support?”

  “Figlia is on the roof,” Goldberg told him, “but that’s about it. Remember how you wanted him boxed in? Well, his little friends stomped all over that plan. At the moment, everyone’s out front keeping the assassins contained.”

  “Great,” Sean murmured as he ran past the two fallen Israelis. “If Gianni has a shot, tell him to take it. If Mikhailov doesn’t leave here in cuffs, he doesn’t leave alive. Mani, I changed my mind. I’ll need help.”

  Manana Shushurin’s voice came on a moment later. “I’m on my way.”

  Sean was about to run into a horde of civilians running for their lives, then tacked to the right. He took two steps, sideways, up the wall, looking like something out of a Fred Astaire dance routine. The route took up both around and above the crowd.

  Once he landed, he jogged a few more feet, then stopped at an intersection of halls, wondering which way Ioseph had gone.

  A scream came from his right, and he took off after it. He leapt over two sprawled bodies, well-built bruisers who were obviously interfering in the matter, their temples almost cracked open.

  Sean didn’t need to see where Ioseph went; a bright red sign told him where to go — the jetway to an airplane. He growled and charged at the door, running through it, running right into Ioseph as he charged out as well.

  Sean’s gun and one of the Uzis went flying, and Sean’s hands went directly to the Uzi still in the Russian’s right hand, twisting the barrel to keep it pointed away.

  Ioseph eyes shone with triumph as he drove his fist into Sean’s kidney. Then again, and a third time, until Sean diverted his right elbow, driving it into the assassin’s temple. With one hand clamped on Ioseph’s gun hand, and the other on the barrel, Sean jerked it over and above his head, then around and down — keeping himself off-line of the barrel and rotating the Russian’s hand clockwise, forcing him to turn around with his arm straight behind him. Sean twisted the Uzi out of his hand just as the mercenary mule-kicked him in the gut.

  Sean fell to the floor of the ramp, still clutching the Uzi — upside-down, and every finger at least an inch away from the trigger. Before he could correct his hold, Ioseph pivoted into a leap, curling his left arm around the Uzi, and driving down with his right, the blade of his hand aiming for Sean’s throat in a stab.

  In a move he knew would hurt, Sean closed his eyes and tucked his chin, causing the stiff fingers to jab against his jaw. At the moment of impact, Sean rolled to his right, taking Ioseph with him, trapping the Uzi under the weight of the Russian’s own body. Before the killer could head-butt him, Sean snapped forward — literally snapping with his teeth, driving deep into the flesh of the Russian’s right hand, then yanking back hard, spitting Ioseph’s own blood right back in his face.

  Ioseph growled and rolled away from Sean, the left arm still trapping the Uzi beneath it. The two came to their feet at the same time, and Ioseph didn’t even try to grab the submachine gun properly — he deliberately dropped it as he wiped the blood from his eyes.

  Sean hurriedly stepped toward him, his right foot forward, almost walking into Ioseph next right jab.

  Sean quickly stepped forward on his left foot, turning his upper body with the motion, and grabbing the attacking wrist with his right hand. His right leg whipped around and behind Mikhailov’s right knee, bringing him down to the other. Then, with a practiced move, Sean pivoted, his front to the assassin’s back, and brought back the arm in a hammer lock, pressing the fist against Ioseph’s own spine. With a push of his knee, Sean brought Ioseph to the ground, arm hammer locked behind his back, knee ground into the small of his spine.

  Sean’s other arm wrapped around his neck. “Game over, sucker.”

  Ioseph slowly drew his knee up under him, fighting Sean’s weight. “You forget something, Ryan,” he said through clenched teeth, his Russian accent reasserting itself. “Kevlar…” he grunted, as he pushed up off the ground with his free hand, “is… good …padding,” he said in a puff as he brought his left foot up underneath him, pushing from the floor to his feet — Sean Ryan dangling from his back.

  With a roar, Ioseph charged down the ramp. And it suddenly occurred to Sean that Ioseph had run into him while running away from the ramp exit. Now he knew why.

  The ramp didn’t have a plane waiting at the gate.

  The Russian assassin charged the ramp’s opening, running for thin air.

  Sean pulled back, trying for a blood choke, but Ioseph had tucked his chin, fighting the grip, and there wasn’t any time for it to effectively knock him out.

  The real problem happened when the assassin grabbed on to Sean’s arm when he tried to let go — and then leapt into mid-air, twisting, so Sean Ryan’s broken and shattered body would break his fall.

  * * *

  Abasi and Captain Wayne kept firing from the van, changing their positions each time, providing cover fire for McGrail and Father Frank as they crawled into the security car.

  The first thing the two did was bring out a box of smoke grenades, which the three shooters immediately grabbed and lobbed over the car.

  The next items however, were three large microwave beam weapons.

  “Villie,” Abasi said into his own radio, “tell Figlia to lay down heavy fire.”

  “Gotcha,” she replied from the control room.

  The noise from the roof intensified as Giovanni Figlia switched from a rifle to a light machinegun, liberally spraying rounds all over the concrete island in the middle of the road.

  McGrail leapt out of the car, turning on one microwave beam weapon to full power, holding it up like an RPG launcher. The energy pulse hit the assassins like a flamethrower. They pulled back behind the concrete columns, safe from the assault

  Father Frank rounded the van on the other side, wielding the same we
apon, closing the area to which the assassins could be exposed. They both set down the weapons on the roofs of two cars, placed forty feet apart. The gunmen were all huddled behind the pillars, protected by the concrete.

  “Like dog with bus,” Captain Wayne said, slipping back into a heavy Russian accent, “we caught them, but what do we do with them?”

  * * *

  Wilhelmina Goldberg swore in Yiddish, and a smattering of Hebrew, and some Aramaic for fun — because the ancients really knew how to swear — and watched as all hell broke out over the entire airport.

  At one end, she had a small contingent of the army of darkness at the front door, spraying automatic fire as though an armistice had been declared for five minutes from now; at the back, she watched as Sean Ryan had the stuffing beaten out of him by the evil little schmuck causing all these problems.

  Well, at least the front door had been relatively covered — Hashim Abasi had managed to get to one of Figlia’s Vatican trucks and get a third microwave emitter. Unfortunately, the bastards in question had managed to find enough cover to keep themselves protected. They were isolated, but still causing havoc.

  She turned back to another camera, watching Manana Shushurin running across the airport like a sprinter seeing that she may be second to the finish line. In fact, Goldberg had to switch to another camera every few seconds, because she ran out of frame just that fast.

  Three security guards tried to stop Shushurin, arms out like a football line, then found themselves bowled over as she dove and rolled, cutting their legs out from under them, and was up and running before they even hit the ground.

  Watching the woman run was almost hypnotic, and she looked pretty cute, too. She hated her just a little bit more for that.

  The Secret Service agent went back to Sean Ryan, watching him as he was clutched to Ioseph Mikhailov’s back while the Russian ran off into space, twisting so that Sean was beneath him as they went down.

  Goldberg blinked. Then she remembered that the average height of a plane like a 747 was six stories off the ground.

  * * *

  Sean floated in the air for a moment, feeling weightless and almost numb as he went down. It was actually rather surreal. Coming from a man who had once been trapped in a burning orc suit, that was saying something.

  Then he hit bottom. The impact happened with a crunch of hard objects shattering into thousands of splinters.

  He lay there for a moment, with a brief instant of pain, looking straight up, his entire field of vision a wall of solid white. Well, it only hurt a bit… I guess I’m dead then.

  Sean blinked… then he noticed he had blinked. He tried moving, and discovered that he hurt, badly, but aside from some aches, he was still functional.

  There was some grunting from his left, and he saw Ioseph disappearing over the side. The side? he thought. Of what?

  Sean groaned as he tried to rise to his feet, and realized that someone had parked a luggage truck underneath the exit ramp. Not to mention that he had landed on luggage. “Oh, hell, that hurt.”

  Instead of rising to his feet, he decided that crawling would be preferred. He could at least pull himself along without hurting… too much.

  As he made his way over the edge, he figured that Ioseph had planned this. The Russian could have easily jumped onto the parked luggage truck. However, that wouldn’t have slowed Sean — jumping onto a padded surface from heights was what he had trained for as a stuntman — but driving Sean into it, and landing of top of him, was something else.

  And Sean saw it had worked as Ioseph ran across the airfield, already obviously ahead of him. Sean stopped at the edge of the luggage container as Ioseph ran off into the distance, then groaned. “Aw, frig.” He reached for his earpiece. “He’s out in the open… could somebody shoot this son of a bitch? I really don’t want to run after him right now.”

  He was answered with a gunshot, not from Ioseph, but from the roof. The shot whistled past Ioseph’s ear as he made a turn, Giovanni Figlia doing his best to pin him down.

  * * *

  “I didn’t know you could shoot a sniper rifle,” Wilhelmina Goldberg told Giovanni Figlia via his earpiece.

  “Of course I can,” Figlia said from the roof of the airport, readjusting his aim. “I’m former SWAT, we at least have to know how to fire it.”

  “What about your beam Tasers?” she asked. “Nonlethal force and all of that.”

  “For him, I am making an exception.”

  “Works for me.”

  The crosshairs followed Ioseph’s back. He knew the man had body armor, but that was the best shot he had. Going for a headshot was always troublesome, even with a normal person who was stationary. A slight move of the head the moment you pulled the trigger could mess up everything. But shooting for something the size of a large hardcover novel while in motion, from over a hundred yards and increasing, was just begging to have a sniper’s bullet miss the mark.

  * * *

  Ioseph continued to dodge and weave, certain that any sniper would go for his torso only, and that was covered with Kevlar. Unless they had armor piercing bullets — which he doubted — he was safe.

  He ran for the nearest building, which looked like a small hangar for a private plane. Even if there wasn’t a plane in there, it didn’t matter — he would be sheltered from the sniper’s bullets.

  Even better, he thought, I can lie in wait for Ryan, and when he finally catches up, I’ll kill him, and then make it out of here without anyone following behind me.

  * * *

  McGrail, Abasi, and the two Williams men all but sagged by the van, grateful that the problems of psychotic gunmen were over with.

  And then the first explosion went off.

  A car, about sixty feet away, exploded, and another, smaller explosion happened a few feet closer than that.

  The four of them literally hit the ground as the shrapnel flew.

  “What the fock was that?” McGrail asked.

  Wayne winced as he saw the metal pineapple fall, a little closer this time. “Grenades.”

  “Damn it! They’re throwing them around the columns?”

  Wayne nodded. “They’re avoiding the beams, but their accuracy is shitty.”

  Another one went off, this time from the other end. “I think they’ll be making up for it soon,” McGrail muttered.

  “We need another beam,” Abasi stated, eyeing the third, unused weapon. “One at right angles with them.” His mouth hardened into a firm line, and then he nodded to himself, coming to a decision.

  He slapped his hands on the concrete and pushed himself to his feet, grabbing the third microwave weapon before he pushed himself into a run.

  Abasi charged around the two currently set up beam weapons, staying out of their field of fire.

  But not out of the assassins’ field of fire.

  Abasi knew that he would be exposed the moment he stuck his head out from behind the van, since he was running at an angle to the killers he was after — and running directly into their line of fire.

  The smoke grenades from the van came quickly, almost furiously as the Egyptian cop dashed toward his goal. The priest, the Irish cop, and the army man each threw smoke bombs, hoping to conceal Abasi’s moves before any of the gunmen caught on to his audacious idea.

  It worked well enough that he was three-quarters of the way to his target when he was shot through the smokescreen.

  * * *

  Giovanni Figlia took several more shots at Mikhailov, and none of them stopped the man, though they did seem to slow him down. “He has gone into the hanger… it is marked N28.”

  The sound of Sean Ryan’s groans echoed in Figlia’s head as Sean asked, “How far out is Manana?”

  “A few more minutes, now that you’re outside,” Goldberg said. “She doesn’t want to take the same way you did.”

  “Works for me,” came the reply.

  Figlia swung his scope back to Sean a moment. The American actually looked tired. He did
n’t even leap gracefully out of the container… he practically fell out, not quite landing on his feet. “Come stai, Ryan?”

  Sean panted, and tried to smile. “It’s just been a busy morning.” He leaned against a crate and looked out, over the airfield, watching Mikhailov’s retreat path along the crates, planes and cargo. “I just feel rather stretched right now, and… I …” Sean paused, his eyes locked on a truck in the distance. “Gianni boy, how good are you with that rifle?”

  “Average, why?”

  “I have… an idea.” He panted. “Goldberg, did you see Mikhailov leave the airfield?”

  “No, but I guess he could have gotten past my cameras, if he wanted.”

  “I don’t think that’s his plan,” Sean continued. “I’m close enough to be the only threat.” He straightened up and walked toward his objective, his normally graceful stride stiff and robotic. “After knocking me off, he would be covered from Gianni, and Mani would get here too late to continue the pursuit. No, he’s in there, and he’s not leaving.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  Sean walked up to the door of the truck he had spotted, and opened the door. “Because it’s what I would do.”

  Figlia blinked at Sean, looking again through his scope to see what the American was doing now. “Sean,” he began, “what are you doing with that fuel truck?”

  * * *

  The first bullet took Abasi in the leg, turning his run into a lopsided, fast limp. The Quasimodo-like walk explained why the next bullet entered his shoulder, instead of his right ear — which was the intended target. A third round scraped along his upper back like a line of fire, shattering his right scapula into several pieces.

  It was the fourth bullet that felled him, raking his right side, shattering two ribs, and puncturing a lung.

  As he fell onto his undamaged left side, Abasi cleared the smoke screen, landing on the concrete to the immediate right of the assassins who had been shooting at him.

  The nearest gunman drew down on Abasi and paused, smiling. He chuckled, and shook his head, carefully taking aim with his assault rifle. His finger wrapped around the trigger—