by Rick Jones
The second man, however, was lightning-quick. He knew there wasn’t time to right his weapon for use, no time to unsling it like his comrade. So he maneuvered into a defensive position by setting his feet and bending his knees, and brought his hands up in a style of martial arts that Isaiah recognized.
The man shouted, the cry carrying over the grounds of the campsite, a warning call. And then he struck out at Isaiah, his hands and feet rising and falling with offensive blows that were fast and well-placed. But Isaiah was a skilled practitioner who easily deflected the thrusts with the counter and clockwise sweeps of his arms. As the North Korean leaned in with a few straight jabs, Isaiah came down with the knife and sliced the man’s forearm, the slash tearing muscle to the bone. As the hostile tried to draw back, Isaiah got low to the ground and pivoted his body in a complete circle with his leg lashing out, cutting the man’s legs out from underneath and sending the soldier airborne. The moment the hostile landed on the ground, the moment he opened his eyes, the last thing he saw was the point of the knife coming down in a sweeping arc.
His death had come so fast he never felt a thing.
Isaiah had been merciful with his kill.
* * *
When a cry canvassed the landscape, the last two soldiers in the Office 35 brigade undid their assault weapons and crossed the open field, the men trying to fix Isaiah within the crosshairs. Then one of the soldiers fell and hit the ground hard with the face-first approach, his body skidding about a foot before it came to a final stop.
When the second soldier saw his companion lying on the ground, he couldn’t understand why the man had fallen, until he noticed the rivulet of blood coursing down his back from a single gunshot wound to the base of his skull, the result of a crack-shooter.
The last man standing directed his gun toward the brush where the shot came from, his eyes growing to the size of communion wafers in panic. Just as he was about to strafe the brush with gunfire, a bullet struck the bridge of the man’s nose and caved in his face, the fatal wound looking like the pucker of a sphincter. The soldier, arcing his back against the blow and going as stiff as a board, finally fell backward into the grass.
In less than forty seconds, the Vatican Knights had neutralized the threat.
Chapter Forty-Four
Just as the Vatican Knights had their hands full, Kimball Hayden had his full as well.
The Vatican Knight slung his weapon over his shoulder, climbed the rungs of the ladder, and poked his head above the train’s roofline. The mouth of the tunnel was quickly approaching, the brightly lit archway growing larger and brighter as the train shortened the gap between them. As wind buffeted his face, a freezing chill, Kimball labored to the rooftop but stayed low to the surface.
Just as the train exited the mountain corridor and entered the full light of day, the sun held a bitter brightness to it as Kimball’s eyes tried to adjust to the sudden transition from darkness to light. When his sight fully adjusted, he saw a large shadow holding steady along the train’s rooftop as the heavy wash of the rotors from the chopper’s blades swept over him from above, the downward gusts pushing and shoving at Kimball until the Vatican Knight eventually lost his footing and went to his knees.
Even though the train continued its pace of 140 kilometers per hour, the chopper easily kept up.
Kimball looked skyward and saw the underbelly of the craft. It was about fifteen meters above him with six rappelling lines hanging out of its bay for immediate transfer, though they dangled several feet above the train’s roof.
Cursing under his breath, Kimball knew that his time was limited with the window of opportunity quickly closing. The procedures for extraction were about to commence. And the soldiers, along with their package, would begin to make their way topside for immediate evacuation.
Reaching for his weapon across his back, Kimball set himself in the prone position with his legs slightly parted, and began to take aim.
That’s when the chopper peeled back and fell behind him.
* * *
The pilot to the Mil Mi-24 was watching the monitor inside the chopper’s cockpit. It was a small screen, approximately 6 x 4, the image coming from a camera that was mounted to the chopper’s undercarriage.
When he saw the man climb to the rooftop, he first considered the soldier to be one of his own. But this man moved differently from most and appeared much larger than anyone on Che’s team. When he zoomed-in, he saw that it wasn’t a soldier at all, but a priest, his Roman collar standing out as a beacon against his dark clothing. Slung across his back was an MP7, the same model carried by Che’s men.
But the priest struggled against the downward sweeps of air provided by the rotors, the man falling to his knees, then to his belly where he took to a prone position, removed his weapon, and began to put the underside of the chopper within his sights.
The pilot had other plans, however, as he peeled away and took a position of his own. With a sly grin born from malicious amusement, he hovered behind the priest, and then he maneuvered the chopper so that it tilted at a forty-five degree angle, and began to nose its way forward with the ends of the rotors spinning like the blades of a blender a foot above the train’s rooftop.
Chapter Forty-Five
Che, Ma and the others had heard the chopper above, so the opportunity was now.
Che then forced Ásbjörn Bosshart close to the platform that divided the cars.
“Please,” Bosshart pleaded, “you have the particles of antimatter. Just give me my family.” Then he began to weep, his chest heaving and pitching with sobs.
Che pulled the man close by the collar of his coat. “Your journey, Doctor, is only beginning. And it starts as soon as we board the chopper. So you either cooperate, or the people who hold your wife and child will follow through and kill them. Did I not make this very clear to you before?”
“You told me to go to Rome, where I would be met by someone in exchange for my family.”
“Plans change all the time,” Che told him. “And they do so in order to benefit those who make them.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“To reunite you with your daughter.” This was the truth.
And Bosshart could see this within the man’s almond-shaped eyes. But the man somehow omitted to mention his wife.
So he asked: “And my wife?”
“Yes. Of course.”
But Bosshart saw the slight tic of one eye as it opened and closed in an involuntary blink, the micro-facial response that he was lying.
Bosshart barked a cry. “You killed her, didn’t you?”
“Do you want to be reunited with your child, Bosshart? Or shall I have her killed right now?”
“Please don’t.”
“Then move,” said Che. “We wait no more.”
He then shoved Bosshart to the platform area between the cars.
Chapter Forty-Six
The blades of the chopper cut through the air with a continuous thwump-thwump-thwump sound, the rotors spinning in blinding revolutions as they nearly touched and scraped along the surface of the train’s roofline. The chopper was moving along the train with a forty-five degree tilt to its flight, the vehicle working its way toward Kimball as he lay on his backside.
The chopper’s pilot was skilled as he maneuvered the blades of the chopper to within a foot above the rooftop’s surface, a gyratory wall of spinning metal that closed in on Kimball in an effort to dice him into pieces no larger than half-dollars.
Kimball began to crawl backward along the roof, using his elbows and legs to draw distance. But the chopper was closing fast, the gap between them growing smaller. He could feel the whipping of the chopper’s blades, could see the blurred motion of the rotors spinning and getting closer. Then he could feel the air between them vibrate, the craft’s power overwhelming.
He then drew his weapon and fired off a few rounds, the bullets sparking on impact and having little effect.
The blades, however,
continued to press closer with the tips of the propellers now within three meters of Kimball, the Vatican Knight trying to kick himself further away, but failing, the gap closing to within two meters and then less than one, the pilot toying with him the same way a cat tortures its prey before the final kill.
Looking up, Kimball saw the housing to the rear propeller and sent off strafing gunfire, the rounds puncturing holes in the metal and causing damage. Suddenly, the Mil Mi-24 seemed to hiccup in its flight before it fell away, the divide between them growing as the pilot tried to regain control.
The chopper began to yaw, the vehicle seesawing up and down like a bull trying to buck off a cowboy at a rodeo. And then its front end dipped sharply, the pilot losing full control as the blades sliced into the train’s roof, the rotors cutting deep to compromise the train’s hull. And then the propellers broke, the pieces taking flight in all directions with one missing Kimball by inches, the waspy hum of debris zipping pass his ear.
The impact with the car threatened the train to nearly jump its rails, the car lifting then settling, as the Mil Mi-24 fell back and to the side, the craft landing hard on its side and exploding into a mushroom fireball, the flames then turning into rolling smoke, and finally to a black column.
Getting to his feet but remaining low to the surface, Kimball made his way to the forward compartment.
Chapter Forty-Seven
The whole world shook with absolute violence as G-Car was nearly divided by the blades of the helicopter. One minute the roof was intact—a second later, spinning blades were cutting through the train's hull and into the surrounding walls, a neat division as the propellers nearly divided the car in half. Chul Kae almost got caught up within the swiftly moving edges, the blades missing him by less than a foot as he stood in the middle of the train’s corridor. But when the blades pulled away, they took with them a part of the train’s roofline, which gave everyone inside the car a view of a uniform blue sky, as freezing air rushed in. A few moments after its withdrawal from the wreckage came an explosion, the Mil Mi-24 having flown its final mission.
Che and Ma looked out the window to see the remnants of their transport nothing but a heap of burning debris. The window of opportunity regarding Operation Scepter Rule had closed. There was no way off the train, no way they could get Bosshart to his people in North Korea to exploit or mine, no way to get the 448 grams of antimatter into the hands of his military constituencies.
Yeong Che was now at the crossroads. He had failed his regime. And the payment for failure was life in a prison, or hard labor working beside family members whose only crimes were to be related by blood, which was seen as the bloodline of failures.
Che fell back and looked through the opening in the roof, saw the blue sky, could feel the rush of cold air strike him enough to steal away his breath for a moment, and then he closed his eyes.
I will not be a failure, he told himself. There’s a solution for everything.
But first things first.
There was a threat on this train, someone who had the ability to disable members under his command, and most likely had been the catalyst to see that the choppers had been downed to neutralize their attempts of extraction. As a soldier he could feel this, sense this, knew that there was a trained technician who had certain skill sets that rivaled his own. So if his team was going to succeed, then they would have to remove the danger—old school 101.
“Tang,” he said, “return to the engineer’s compartment and govern the train. We may have to divert to other channels to avoid authorities.”
That was when Tang told him about the console panel, how he sent off a series of rounds that destroyed the control and navigational systems. And how the train was running with a life of its own with no way to manage it.
After Che blistered the man with insults, he walked away to think.
…There’s a solution for everything…
…There’s a solution for everything…
…I will not be a failure…
…I will not be a failure…
And then he pivoted quickly on the balls of his feet and faced his teammates. “Tang, return to the compartment and see what you can do to regain control. There must be a backup program to handle matters regarding runaway trains, since I believe the situation is not one of uniqueness. Find it.”
Tang bowed his head, said something so softly that Che didn’t even hear it, and headed off to the fore section of the train’s engine-compartment.
Che, fighting for calm, shoved Ásbjörn Bosshart into his roomette and forced him into his seat. “You do not move for any reason,” he told him. “If you do, I will kill you.”
Bosshart shrugged. “Where am I going to go?”
Che slammed the door shut and looked at Ma, who continued to hold the canister. “Secure the particles,” he told his teammate. “In a safe place. Right now you, me, and Kae are going on a hunt to find the one responsible for this.”
“It’s a long train,” said Ma. “Many people. Whoever is doing this is hiding amongst them. It might be difficult.”
“Not so much,” returned Che, holding up his assault weapon. “It’s just a matter of ferreting out the ones responsible. If he—or they—have the courage to save lives under the threat of execution or death, then he—or they—will surely give themselves up.”
“Perhaps. But if they don’t, then what?”
Che’s answer was quick and precise. “Then we’ll kill them all,” he said. “We will kill each and every one onboard this train if we have to, out of sheer principle for the regime.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Frederic Becher thought the train was coming apart around him, the vibrations of the propellers sawing through the hull intense. Sliding the door to his roomette aside, he peeked out just in time to see the blades of the chopper pulling away after they nearly sawed the car in half, barring the floor. The hull was so badly compromised that portions of the walls and the ceiling were beginning to shear away from the force of the rushing wind.
Then he witnessed the target of the extraction shoved inside his roomette with obvious instructions for the man to stay put. To disregard his orders would only invite death. And then a conversation followed among his team in Korean, the body-English involved interpreted by Becher that they were about to commit themselves to sweeping the train.
So Becher fell back into his roomette and grabbed his weapon. He knew they would use due diligence in their search methods, spot the weapon, and take action.
“Once a Vatican Knight,” he said out loud, “always a Vatican Knight…Potissimum fide, praeter honestatem.” Loyalty above all else, except honor.
Though his skills had been limited by time and age, he could still man a weapon and provide cover for Kimball by drawing their attention away from him.
Then Becher looked at his weapon with appraisal and sighed. My life ends here, he thought, with a weapon in my hand.
Then he looked ceilingward towards Heaven, and he spoke to God not in prayer but in conversation, asking for forgiveness and understanding, and to bathe him with the Glory of His Light.
Please forgive me for my past sins…For I have tried.
Then he reached for his most prized possession, the photo of him standing behind Ayana. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever set his eyes on, his heart dissolving the moment he saw her pass through the gates of Auschwitz, his passion forever consumed by her.
A smile appeared on his face enough for his lips to part, the beam driven by pleasant thoughts. He remembered their moments together, the kisses they shared in the shadows late at night beyond the shine of search lights, a cardinal sin in the eyes of his brethren.
“But I didn’t care,” he said to himself.
Then he traced the tips of his fingers over the photo’s glossy sheen, could almost feel the outline of her face as he did so, such as the curvature of her sweet lips and the angles of her face.
“My Ayana,” he whispered with endearment.
“If you’re on the other side waiting, then all of this will be worth it. I would gladly surrender what I had left in life to be in your arms once again.”
Then he looked ceilingward once again, this time with a teardrop escaping from the corner of his eye. Please, Lord, if she is in Your embrace, all I ask is to be with my Ayana once more.
And then: Have I done enough to earn that right?
Then he heard the door to his car open. The enemy was beginning its sweep of the cars.
Becher tucked the photo into his shirt pocket and gripped his weapon hard with both hands. Now, he thought, the mystery of life after life is about to be answered. And to you, Kimball Hayden, I wish you luck in your search for the Light.
At the moment his final thought echoed through his mind, the door to his roomette slid to the side. But Becher was able to manage a smile. “Afternoon, gentlemen.”
The gunfire between them was very short.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Emily Bosshart had tucked herself into the corner of the trailer using a flipped over table as a form of cover, when footsteps crossed the floor of the room and came to a stop on the table’s other side.
“Hello, Emily,” the voice said in English. It was honey soft, the tone kind and gentle. And then the man righted the table, got to a bended knee, and smiled with his lips parted enough to show rows of ruler-straight teeth. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” he told her, and then he offered his hand for her to take. “My name is Isaiah,” he added, his smile still warm, still gentle. “And I’m here to take you home.
