by Al Ruksenas
Pointing his finger in majestic arrogance at the three, he lowered his voice again and said with assurance: “When all this comes to pass, then will occur the historical hour! Then will come the moment when you seize events and fulfill the most ambitious dream of which you ever dreamed—a red banner flying the length and breadth of this earth!”
The three Soviets stood frozen in beguilement and fear.
“Your enemy’s achievements in science and the art of destruction will become the very means by which she will succumb to your power.”
The Old One let his visitors savor his words.
“But hear me!” he declared. “You will have this only for a time. For the ultimate glory will be ours.” He said this with longing and with unshakeable certainty. “Your own victory will be a prelude. It will serve to hasten the day when the entire world pays rightful homage to our Prince—the Prince of the Netherworld!”
His cat eyes widened and his voice rose to a crescendo as he announced: “All this will come to pass because the people of America have at last—they have at long last been gifted with the visage of the Devil’s Eye!”
The three Russians stood transfixed. To speak now was to risk mortal danger because the Old One’s rolling eyes radiated: madness.
“You are to do but one thing,” the Old One commanded. “You will infiltrate my young supplicant into the United States of America. You are practiced at these things. Even as we speak I know from your Commissar Dekanazov that you have well‐positioned agents in the American system. You will use your established espionage networks and resources to get him there.” The Old One looked at the secret policemen menacingly. “You are to assure that he remains undetected. You are to see that no harm comes to his person while he undertakes his great work.”
“Another ‘Rasputin’,” thought Nikolai Kuznetsov apprehensively.
“Do you understand what I am saying?” the Old One asked with a hypnotic stare.
“We understand,” General Lysenko replied immediately, fearful of causing the slightest aggravation in the wizardly figure before them.
“All the rest will be done by us,” the Old One declared. “Your Commissar Dekanazov in Moscow has agreed to our little arrangement,” he said with mocking emphasis on “little.”
With a wave of his hand the Old One abruptly dismissed the entourage and started back to the connecting chamber from which he came. The three Soviets glanced furtively at each other and watched the young goateed figure slowly approach them. The hooded escort turned and started walking back to the stairway leading to the upper reaches of the abbey. The three secret policemen eagerly followed.
Just then three of the hooded men grabbed Major Yuri Rudenko from behind, pinning his hands and dragging him back toward the chamber where the Old One had disappeared.
“What is this? What are you doing? No! No!” Rudenko blurted with a quivering voice that suddenly released his pent up fear.
“Lysenko! Lysenko!” he pleaded. Major Rudenko dug his heels into the cavern floor, trying vainly to keep the hooded men from dragging him away. He squirmed futilely in the grip of his captors.
“Keep walking!” the goateed man commanded General Lysenko and Colonel Kuznetsov. “Do not look back!”
The two Russians fearfully obeyed.
They reached the stone stairs and scrambled upward, held back only by the unhurried pace of two of the guards ahead of them. Major Rudenko disappeared with his abductors into the chamber beyond. Moments later Lysenko and Kuznetsov heard an inhuman wail, high‐pitched and reverberating with terror. It filled the cavern and chilled Lysenko and Kuznetsov to the bone. A low, incessant, hollow chant started by a number of voices was barely audible against the major’s unworldly scream of fear and protest against impending death.
Suddenly Yuri Rudenko’s voice broke into a muffled gargle. Then silence.
The chant became louder now, more incessant. More voices were joining in and the chamber beyond hummed with a repetitious ceremonial cadence: “Elohim, Elohim, Eloah Va‐Daath. Elohim, El Adonai, el Trabaoth, Shaddai. Tetragrammaton, Iod. El Elohim, Shaddai. Elohim, Elohim…”
General Lysenko’s thirty years of revolutionary struggles and even more deadly internecine intrigue which had molded him into a calloused, cold‐blooded man could not quell the depth of terror coursing through his body, causing it to shake visibly. He missed a step as he clambered up the cramped stairwell, desperate to reach the outside.
Behind him the goateed man climbed solemnly with a wicked smile on his face.
Colonel Kuznetsov kept pace with Lysenko. The young major’s scream was still resounding in him, sending shivers up and down his body. Kuznetsov tried to blot it from his mind and steel himself with a raging determination to get out of this cursed abbey alive. Colonel Kuznetsov, true to Soviet dictates, had never been a believer, but he could not shake the overpowering realization that if there was no God, there ought to be one now.
He climbed as fast as the retinue in front of him allowed, planting his feet hard on each stone, resolutely pushing away some unknown, but very real threat.
Some harrowing minutes later they emerged in the courtyard. Someone had already ordered the pilot to start the engines of the helicopter and the swirling blades were again shrouding the craft in blinding dust.
When Colonel Kuznetsov reached the hatch of the tadpole‐belly of the helicopter, one of the hooded guardsmen thrust his pistol back into his shoulder holster and pointed him physically to the ladder. He scrambled up with lowered head against the sandy fury. General Lysenko was ahead of him, already disappearing through the hatch with the urgent tugging of the co‐pilot. Next came the goateed man who wordlessly climbed aboard, entered the cargo area, and sat down on the bench opposite the two Russians.
The co‐pilot was leaning out of the cockpit with one hand grasping the bulkhead, trying to see Major Rudenko emerge from the raging dust at the foot of the ladder.
“Close the hatch!” General Lysenko shouted.
The co‐pilot turned with a puzzled look to the General, then eyed the new arrival with the goatee and hooded cassock.
“Close the hatch!” Lysenko commanded. “Get the devil out of here!”
General Lysenko sensed that as long as the goateed man was in the air with them, no sudden calamity could befall them. When they landed in Aswan, he assured himself, he would wash his hands of this strange sorcerer and let the Illegals Section do whatever they wanted with him.
The secret police general was visibly agitated.
“Come now, my General,” the goateed man soothed with palatable cynicism, “you know that a pact like ours requires a seal of blood—a small token to assure our success.”
Lysenko said nothing. He had to presume the sacrifice of Major Rudenko was approved by Commissar Dekanazov in the Kremlin. He looked at Colonel Kuznetsov, wondering how much more his subordinate may have been told. Colonel Kuznetsov’s return challenging stare—so unusual in a subordinate and typically self‐destructive during the Stalinist era—convinced him he was just as stunned.
Colonel Nicholai Kuznetsov’s raging eyes were, in fact, demanding to know whether it could have been him, instead of Major Rudenko, who was sacrificed.
“It’s no loss,” General Lysenko felt compelled to murmur. “Rudenko was suborned by the American CIA,” he lied.
The goateed man leaned back against the fuselage and listened to the rhythm of the toiling engines. He was pleased to see how handily his Teacher had sown fear and discord between the remaining secret policemen. The unholy monk knew his own task held great promise. His wicked smirk remained fixed in that satisfaction, obscured from view by his shadowy hood.
Urgently, the helicopter labored out of the dark recesses of the narrow canyon and headed westward toward the Nile in the moon‐bathed landscape of the open desert.
The Near Future
Chapter 1
Colonel Christopher Caine was leaning on the fender of a black limousine parked in the nor
th oval of The White House. He gazed around the expansive grounds, drawing in the sweet smell of April and trying to locate an elusive mockingbird whose call was coming somewhere from the new growth of holly bushes lining the drive.
He spotted the bird darting in and out of the bushes toward the north portico. The charcoal bird swooped effortlessly around the cylindrical light that hung prominently above the entrance, then disappeared into another thicket of bushes along the white façade of the Executive Mansion.
A uniformed Secret Service officer standing at the entrance noticed it too and followed the flight of the bird with a leisurely gaze that indicated a momentary respite from the sameness of standing guard at the entrance to the President’s residence. Colonel Caine’s eyes met those of the officer. They nodded slightly, recognizing each other’s presence.
Caine’s ruggedly handsome features broke into a brief private smile. He was thinking of this peaceful interlude in an almost pastoral setting which surrounded the nerve center of the nation and to a great extent a large portion of the known world. Colonel Caine stood unchallenged in the driveway, but he knew that the Secret Service officer would confront him if he came onto the portico—his military uniform notwithstanding. Funny, he mused, just two generations earlier his great‐great grandfather, a Cavalry officer in Robert E. Lee’s headquarters command, was riding northward to win this place for the Confederacy.
Now, Colonel Caine stood here, an officer in the U.S. Army, a guardian of his nation and up to a point—the distance between himself and the Secret Service officer—a guest of the President of the United States. If the guard would even have an inkling that Colonel Caine was an officer in the ultra‐secret Omega Group, there would be grounds for an investigation into a breach of national security. As it was, the Secret Service officer probably thought the Colonel was an overqualified driver for a pampered Pentagon general.
Caine’s commanding officer, General William Bradley, had summoned him abruptly that morning to drive him to an emergency meeting at the White House. The General valued Caine immensely. His chief subordinate officer was a practiced expert at military strategy and tactics and a secretly decorated soldier of the new age of warfare.
He planned and led raids into the jungles of Columbia and Thailand to eliminate ranking chiefs of worldwide drug networks, incursions into Mexico to stem drug cartels brazenly battling the government, and coordinated secret missions into the lawless north of Pakistan to disrupt the resurgence of terrorist religious sects. Most recently Colonel Caine had coordinated clandestine operations in Africa. The dual purpose was to neutralize bands of renegade soldiers who were creating havoc in several countries which were trying to establish democracies for the first time in their histories, and to stop genocidal actions of certain African governments themselves.
Whenever United Nations peacekeepers were persuaded to enter world hotspots, their reluctance was eased when diplomatic leaks assured the likelihood that some clandestine commando organization had already been there to pave the way. No one knew its name, presuming “Delta Force” to be the highest level of specialized operations in the U.S. government.
But nothing worried western nations more than the persistent attempt by the old guard in the former Soviet Union to privatize nuclear weapons and use their possession as a coercive means to regain power. They were trying through familiar terrorist groups that had gained ascendancy after the U.S. was attacked by powerful religious blasphemers on September 11, 2001. The Omega Group was given extraordinary leeway to prevent that.
Colonel Caine had been waiting almost an hour, scrolling idly through the latest news on his smartphone when his eyes caught the outline of a military figure inside the glass door of the portico. The figure was blurred by reflections of outside images on the glass doors, including the darting mockingbird retracing its frenetic path along the Executive Mansion.
Caine scrolled quickly through an item, knowing his General would be out in a minute: “Rural Sheriff Investigates Animal Mutilations.” The story had a familiar theme. Local residents in downstate Ohio had reported to authorities that someone was raising a ruckus on remote farmland in the middle of the night. Investigators had found little evidence of anything, except charred animal bone fragments and the remnants of what appeared to be a crude upside down cross. People suspected devil worship. The sheriff would not venture to speculate. “These kinds of things are blown out of proportion,” the sheriff was quoted. “Just like flying saucers.”
By now, General Bradley was coming toward the limousine. He was tall, barrel‐chested and walked with a limp—a reminder of the second Iraqi war. Following General Bradley was the Secretary of Defense, Ronald Stack. They were accompanied by the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Directors of the FBI and CIA.
All wore grim looks on their faces as they hurried to their limousines parked herd‐like on the curved White House drive.
Colonel Caine had not remembered such a concentrated meeting of principals in the Omega Group since the time Middle East agents had been implicated in an attempt to sabotage Air Force One a year earlier during the President’s summit trip to Europe. This was in apparent retaliation for the U.S. bombing of a terrorist headquarters in Sudan with the help of mercenary Arab adventurers. The plot was secretly foiled, but there followed a perceptible increase in aggressive fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world accompanied by increased acts of terrorist violence in western countries with even more vehement threats against the United States.
General Bradley approached the limousine. Colonel Caine stowed his phone, straightened his posture and opened a rear door for his commanding officer.
Bradley waved off the courtesy and gestured he would sit in front. This must be really serious Caine surmised. The General was muttering something as he climbed in.
Colonel Caine entered the driver’s side and looked expectantly at General Bradley.
“Jeannie McConnell’s missing.”
“Jeannie McConnell? The Speaker’s daughter?” Caine repeated in disbelief. He preferred to think she was spending time with some member of the diplomatic corps—obviously wanting to be discreet. He started the engine and slowly drove toward the White House gates.
Jeanette McConnell was a curvaceous blonde who floated freely in Washington and Hollywood social circles, not so much that she was the daughter of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, but because she was an uninhibited spirit who seemed a natural part of the social pulse of Washington and enjoyed the attention of the rich and powerful. She was linked intermittently with various high‐profile men, younger and older, single and not so single.
“Her family’s had no contact for over a week,” General Bradley explained. “McConnell’s checked her apartment, hangouts, friends. There’s no sign of her. The Congresswoman says it’s not like her.”
“Are you sure it’s…”
“I know what you’re going to say, Chris. We all know about Jeannie and her lifestyle. I hope it ends up nothing. Normally, this would be a case for the Washington Police Department. We know there’s been a couple of missing person incidents lately—women joggers. I still can’t figure out why they run alone at odd hours in remote parks. Anyway, this does not fit the pattern. Jeannie’s not a jogger.”
“Something else then?” Caine urged. He looked ahead at two limousines in front of them heading toward the White House gates.
“This looks like a terrorist hit. A twist. No mass destruction, but hitting at the heart of our system. Up close and personal. Her mother’s second in line for the Presidency. Maybe payback for Saddam Hussein’s two sons who we iced before we arrested the old man.”
“They were shooting at us. Heat of battle,” Caine replied. “And that was a long time ago.”
“Traditional blood feuds don’t allow for such distinctions,” Bradley countered.
“Yes, sir,” Caine agreed. “But then, there’ve been a number of unsolved disappe
arances of young women in the Washington area over the past couple of years. None well‐known, though.”
“Damn, they should let you in on these meetings,” General Bradley replied. “So I wouldn’t have to keep repeating myself. The President received intel on this one. It’s one of the Middle East terrorist groups.”
“Al Qaida linked?”
“Who knows?” Bradley paused. “And who cares? They all spit the same bile. We’re going to send you to find out.”
“What’s the lead?”
“Bob Coulson out of CIA,” General Bradley replied. “He just reported to the President that a contact in Moscow knows that some fringe group pledging support for Al Qaida boasted that they have her.”
“Who’s, who and what’s what out of Moscow is still a good guessing game.” Colonel Caine noted. “Especially Intelligence.”
