A Pius Legacy

by Declan Finn

  The crowd shouted “allahu ahkbar!” all around…and almost as fast as they came, they turned around and marched the other way, just as angry as before, but with a different target. The Imam shouted at their backs, “The Saudi embassy is that way!” The crowd shifted direction. And the Imam smiled.

  And Ryan blinked, staring at the television, mouth agape. “Habib Marwan, that son of a bitch.”

  “What’s the matter, laddie? You know the Muslim fella?”

  Ryan looked over his shoulder at Deaglan Lynch, and he smiled. “Yes, I do.” He stood, and headed towards the refrigerator. “I need another drink. Send some of the boys out for some Gatorade? I’ll need it.”

  Lynch arched a brow. “Listen, laddie, I’ve been thinking.”

  Ryan unscrewed the top of the first bottle in the fridge and said, “Always a dangerous proposition,” before he downed some of the neon-green liquid.

  “As much as I want the Pope out of jail, do you think we’ll need to? After all, it’s not like it will accomplish much. The farce can continue in his absence, and there’s every possibility it will only provoke the fockers to come back in force.”

  Ryan grinned. “Because he’s the Pope. This Euro-trash cannot come into the house of God, kill the Pope’s man—my friend—kidnap my Pontiff, and get away with it.” His eyes crackled like lasers, and his fist tightened around the bottle so hard, the plastic slowly folded. “They want him so bad, then they can come back to claim him, and bring a bigger army. The heck with how ‘useful’ he’ll be, the ‘difference’ it’ll make. The Pope is not a tool, a pawn in political chess! These bastards had no right to him! The ‘difference,’ my dear Commandant, will be a matter of justice. That he comes back to his rightful place, damn the transnational dimwits. The church was international law before the Dutch learned how to shoot heroin and Geneva learned how to write.” He pointed to the television screen. “And we will save the Pope because that man just saved the Vatican so Josh will have some place to come back to.”

  Lynch arched a brow. “And who is he?”

  “ ‘Imam Habib Marwan’—a name he stole from a TV show. His name is Scott Murphy, and he works for Mossad.”

  Lynch blinked. “Funny, he doesn’t look Jewish.”

  “Come on, we have work to do. And you still need to get to the nearest construction site.”

  Chapter XXVI

  Operation

  Catherine of Siennea

  Belgium. 3:00 AM

  Day 9

  The machine was huge and ugly, and looked like a device from a monster movie. Three giant spinning disks upon a giant rotating platform, and each of the disks had three drills on them. And the platform was multi-directional.

  The drill ate through the walls of the the Belgian prison facility. The monster burst through the walls of the lowest, deepest level of the makeshift prison.

  Once the dust cleared and the driver checked for any welcoming party, he stepped out of the drill truck and smiled. He wore a MOLLE carry-all vest and liquid body armor, carried a rucksack behind him, and held a XM29 rifle in his hand. “Honey, I’m hoooome.”

  He looked around the dark, lightless hallways, then sighed. “Darn, no one around to appreciate a good entrance.”

  He stepped off the drill and got to work, readying the area for the arrival of what would probably be every single soldier in the bunker if not the country…

  Five minutes later, he stood at the vertex of hallways, rifle in one hand, rubber bullet gun in the other.

  Sean Ryan waited, rifle ready, when the first head peeked out into the intersecting hallway. He fired once with the handgun, kicking the man’s head back with a rubber bullet.

  A second later, they didn’t bother sending in the team, just one grenade. Ryan reflexively fired with the handgun, and the rubber bullet accidentally—by some strange miracle—hit the grenade, sending it back into the door from which it came. The explosion killed at least three people.

  After a moment, the attackers came to the conclusion that if he was using rubber bullets, then he couldn’t be all that dangerous, now could he? They could just rush him.

  And rush him they tried. They gathered around the door before rushing out in one giant burst of speed.

  And they rushed right past Ryan. Not one of them had looked up as they passed by. If they had, they would have noticed that Sean A.P. Ryan had performed what he called a split jump. As far as he was he concerned, it should have been standard procedure for any stuntman, even if half of the maneuver required quickly “walking” up the wall like in an old Fred Astaire film—the difference happened on the second step, where he pushed off of the wall, splitting his legs wide, bracing himself against two walls.

  As the soldiers charged into the hallway, Sean Ryan essentially clung to the ceiling braced into position by his legs, holding the rifle, making him look like a heavily-armed spider.

  The web of Ryan’s trap sprang upon the enemy as he opened fire, spraying the entire assault team with automatic fire in a lethal hail of bullets. Every bullet he fired went exactly where he wanted it to. It wasn’t even a matter of conscious thought as he took head shots of every attacker.

  Of those who didn’t die in the first few seconds, half tried to return fire, half tried to get into a secure position before firing—which didn’t work in a narrow hallway—neither succeeded. The ones who tried to fire back couldn’t see him in the darkened hall until it was too late, if they found him at all. During a gunfight in a hallway, few people expected to get attacked from behind and above. The last few were taken down with the SMG underneath the primary barrel.

  Ryan reloaded before dropping to the ground. He had used fifty bullets for forty people (he was cautious about the new SMG, hence the “wasted bullets”), and had considered hanging there further. But, he didn’t want to know what it would do to his legs if he hung around much longer, and he didn’t want to risk a situation where he would have to reload in mid-firefight. Besides, if the troops that came next had an ounce of sense, only a pointman would come through the hallway, seeing that they were all shot in the back.

  Then game over, he thought as he walked along the hallway, rifle barrel lowered. He looked over the bodies of the dead, listening for any approaching attackers. The guns used by the guards were the FN F2000—Belgian weaponry. That made sense. After all, they were in Belgium. It was a nice, tightly packed weapon in a bull pup configuration.

  But the most important part about it is that it fired 5.56mm NATO rounds, just like Ryan’s XM29.

  Waste not, want not.

  By the time he had collected all the ammunition he could carry—probably more than he needed—the radio squawked. And Ryan smiled. He grabbed the radio, and started speaking in his best French, firing off several gunshots from a fallen FN F2000. “Aide! Aide! Nous sommes sous l’attaque! Douzaines d’entre eux! Nous—”

  He let the radio button go. He had all but told them to send every soldier in the building.

  * * *

  On the surface, as the general alarm sounded, only two guards remained on the top floor of the prison. However, the top floor was the ground floor for the building above. While there were ten levels of fortified bunker below the surface, a law firm had been structured on top of it, concealing it from general view.

  The guards in question were in charge of guarding the “special elevator” that went down to the bunker itself.

  Fr. Williams smiled as he walked into the building. There was something ironic about building a law firm atop an old Nazi bunker. Maybe because the Nazis had subverted the law of man, or that the law was now being perverted for the same goal that the Nazis themselves had—taking out another Pope named Pius.

  Fr. Francis Williams was dressed in his usual black suit, looking casual, and not quite the sort of person to stand out in a law office lobby. The medium-sized priest tottered up to the guards, looked at them, and reached for the button to call the elevator.

  One guard grabbed his hand, and he smil
ed.

  Three seconds later, both guards were on the floor, and he was already stripping off their rifles, then other accessories.

  He looked up towards the front door to see the five priests walk into the lobby. He was half-surprised that this motley crew hadn’t attracted any attention. At least Cardinals Khan and Sin had left their bright, ruby-red robes at home. Cardinal Sin looked neat and tidy in his simple black uniform, and looked even tidier next to the Bucharest Auxiliary Bishop, Vladimir Pieczenik, who still looked like a reject from a Gypsy film. And Nolan still looked so much like an Irish cop stereotype, he half-expected him to wear dress blues.

  Francis nodded to the guards. “Your Eminences, please help me strip these men and assemble their equipment. Pieczenik, Nolan, please keep a lookout. Ryan should be keeping them well and busy while we break Pius out.”

  Cardinal Sin sighed. “This just would have been so much easier if the Pope just signed a resignation letter in the event of his capture. It worked with Pius XII.”

  Francis looked over his shoulder. “Yes, but we did not anticipate or expect this level of ineptitude from the UN. After all, who could have conceived that the French could do something so unintelligent?” He turned back to the artillery when he stopped, sighed, and said, “Don’t answer that.”

  * * *

  Ryan watched the waves of soldiers come after him from the safety of his flat-screen palmtop computer. Every once in a while, he would tap a button and set off a string of squibs, which mimicked gunfire like it did in the movies. They did no harm or damage, but the approaching soldiers would halt, and by increments, the line of approach would become slightly more congested. He waited for them to come closer…and closer…and closer…until they were one hallway away, with enough firepower to lay waste to an entire tank.

  Then Ryan hit the transmitter in his pouch.

  All of the activity was seen via short-range pinhole cameras scattered throughout the hallway, transmitted to Ryan’s iPhone.

  Each of these cameras was attached to a carefully well-hidden claymore mine, which involved a shaped-directional charge of C4 and ball bearings, making it a very big shotgun.

  Up and down the hallway, every soldier was hit by a shaped charge of plastic explosive.

  Ryan ran straight at his opponents, blasting at any survivors. While there were people who ran, they couldn’t do it fast enough.

  After a while, Ryan wondered why he brought anything other than explosives.

  And then he saw the new weaponry his adversaries carried as he passed their corpses.

  FAMAS rifles… The French were here as well.

  Unfortunately for them, so was he.

  * * *

  Ioseph Mikhailov stood at the entrance to the lowest level and smiled. Someone was in the middle of an attempted jailbreak, and that was good. What would be even better would be if they got away with Pius XIII.

  It didn’t matter. Mikhailov might let the bastards go off with the Pope, if only for the reason that they would only reinforce perception of the Vatican as a force capable of defending itself.

  And then we’ll take the Pope back and slap escape charges on him… or we can always put a bullet in his head.

  The intruder was close… the last of the explosives had been very close, and so was he, Mikhailov was sure. He slowly took up position and smiled, gun ahead of him.

  The barrel of a gun poked out from around the corner, two barrels in fact, and Mikhailov wheeled behind the doorframe for a short burst of fire. He waited, paused, and whirled again. Only this time, the guns were still there, waiting.

  Mikhailov’s eyes widened in surprise as a thought occurred to him—this man had been coordinating his explosions.

  How?

  Answer: pinhole cameras, you dummy!

  He leapt back just as Ryan fired the first grenade from the XM29.

  Mikhailov barely missed the fires of the explosion, and kept running up the stairs until he was out of the line of sight of the door…there could be no more cameras beyond this point, because the intruder didn’t have the time, and if he could have the time to get beyond the top floor, he could have run the entire bombing attack from a different level.

  Ioseph Mikhailov retreated to a safe distance, and waited, and thought. Particularly he thought simply that these methods were so similar to the ones his father talked about—crazy, creative, and destructive—and knew who was down here with him.

  And Ryan can die here, how nice.

  * * *

  After the general alert went out to go after Ryan, there were only ten guards left per floor, and even they were merely Belgian. However, they weren’t a matter of concern, because the priests knew exactly where they were, where the Pope was, and the location of everything else that mattered.

  It helped that they had the support of a certain computer hacker named Blaine Lansing, who not only found a backdoor into the computer mainframe, finding the location of the Pope’s cell, but also the security procedures, and complete access to the security cameras … which were all conveniently turned off as the company of priests traveled through the stairwells of the bunker, not even bothering to get off on unnecessary floors.

  The six of them got off on the fourth floor down. Frank opened the door wide enough to stick a handgun out the door. He fired two silenced gas canisters in each direction down the hallway, releasing tear gas on impact. He then followed, weapon leading the way.

  He ran down the hall while three of the priests held position.

  Cardinal Sin ran down the opposite direction, hanging a left turn when the hall stopped. He held his breath as he dashed into the cloud of gas and whirled, firing down the hall, into the guards at the other end. He burst out of the gas cloud, still firing.

  At the other end of the hall, Fr. Williams did the same thing.

  When they both reached their second cloud of gas and smoke, they stopped as they got out their flash bang grenades. They pulled the pins, and threw their flash bangs down the hall, towards each other. The guards who had all retreated were clustered together in front of the door to the Pope’s cell when the flash-bangs went off, blinding and deafening all of them.

  Fr. Williams charged out of one end of the hall, Cardinal Sin the other, and the blind and helpless guards couldn’t have resisted the assault from the two well-trained men.

  Sin looked at the cell door while Fr. Williams searched the guards. “How are we to get in?”

  “This lock is pretty sophisticated, impossible to open. Retinal scanners, code key, key card, analog key, biometric fingerprint scanner, and what looks like voice identification, not to mention a DNA reader.”

  The Cardinal blinked. “Didn’t we know before we came here?”

  “Some of it, yes. Also, we don’t have any of the biometric information, or the codes, it seems.”

  Sin looked down the hall, the gas was clearing. “How are we to get in then?”

  He looked back and the door was open, Fr. Williams was already halfway in. “We have a computer hacker with access to the security system.”

  Inside, the Pope looked up from his book on medical ethics and smiled. “I was waiting for you. Thank for you for being so prompt.”

  * * *

  Sean Ryan knew someone out there was still alive, mainly because he had seen the man in the pinhole camera, and couldn’t find a body. Also, it was Ioseph Mikhailov.

  “Hey, Ioseph,” he called up the stairs, “want to come out and play?”

  The last thing I need is an annoying super-villain wannabe to make this job even harder.

  Ryan looked out into the darkness of the stairwell, and barely saw a little glimmer at the top of the stairs. The lights were turned on about two floors above, by the look of it.

  Which means that someone had deliberately shut down the power to the lower floors; somebody expected him to come in this way.

  So, it was a trap, and he had a funny feeling that he knew exactly who was behind it.

  I’m going to find M
r. Mikhailov and hurt him. Now I’m in the bloody dark… Then again, who am I kidding? I’m usually in the dark.

  He thought for a moment. If positions were reversed, he’d first back out of sight of the pinhole cameras … After all, Ryan would have found those cameras, why not this bastard?

  And then?

  Ryan sprinted suddenly, running into the darkness as though being chased by the souls of the men he had just sent straight to Hell. As soon as he thought that he would be out of range of his own cameras, he dropped and rolled across the ground, seconds before automatic fire cut through the air where he had been. The end of the hallway turned to the stairs, and he knew that’s where anyone would take up position to shoot at him.

  At which point, Ryan fired back with the HE round from the top barrel of the XM29.

  * * *

  At the other end of the hall, Mikhailov leapt up the stairs before the grenade landed, but the shock wave still knocked him off his feet.

  Next time, I just kill the bastard and be done with it. Mikhailov rose to his feet, and he creaked. Damn, I’m getting old.

  Three shots came from down the hallway, and rubber bullets ricocheted off the wall and up the stairwell. Two of the bullets slapped Ioseph on the arm, wrenching it half out of its socket. Damn it.

  “Ryan,” Mikhailov called down, “are you sure you’re not taking this too personally?”

  “You murder my grandfather, threaten my church, kidnap my Pope, kidnap and torture me, and, what, I’m supposed to be zen about this?” Ryan asked. “I hate to break it to you, but I’m not into motorcycle maintenance.”

  Mikhailov smiled. “But isn’t your church against revenge?”

  “I’m just saving the Pope. Killing you would be a side benefit.”

  Mikhailov swung down and around the staircase, only to find Sean Ryan already there, aiming straight for his head. He pulled back in time to avoid a disciplined two round burst. This guy’s good. Why couldn’t he have worked for me?