Not that Americans should pat themselves on the back. We gave half of the bastards who flew the planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center the right to vote.
I mentioned that, and I admitted that the problem was as serious for the nonextremist majority of the Muslim world as it was for the rest of us. But I wasn’t talking to imams, and so I continued with the unpleasantly obvious, telling the Europeans in the hall that it was time to face up to the fact that they had built their economy over the past two decades on cheap labor from northern Africa and the Muslim world. Now the bill was coming due in unexpected ways. There were no easy ways to pay it. Ratcheting up security precautions and striking terrorists where they live—the things I’m an expert in—were the easy part of the problem—and we hadn’t even done them very well.
“How hard do you think it would be to slip a weapon in here?” I asked. “There were metal detectors at the door and an X-ray machine—what percentage of weapons did they catch? Fifty? Ten? I’d say, the only things they caught were the weapons that wanted to be caught.”
At that I reached into my waistband to pull out the Glock 26 that I had smuggled past the front-door check. That got a gasp—but not nearly the reaction that followed a moment later, when I shot the SOB with the grenade at the back of the hall.
I hadn’t planned on the show-and-tell. As much as I like ad-libbing, working without a script can be a bit like batting a live hand grenade around in a crowded ballroom.
Which is exactly what happened as my bullet struck the ersatz waiter dead-on in the forehead. He’d been pulling the pin from the grenade when I shot him, and the now-live weapon flew upward. The man next to him tried grabbing it in midair, a very foolish if natural impulse. He missed, and the grenade bounded upward like a volleyball.
Have I ever mentioned that Karen was a championship volleyball player in high school?
Karen took the tap and smashed it toward the window twenty feet away. It broke through the glass and exploded a second later, fortunately over an area that had been cordoned off as part of the security against car bombers. Mussolini’s ghost on the window balcony nearby may have taken it on the chin, but no living creature was harmed, not even one of the pigeons flocking on the roofline.
The thick walls of the building muffled the explosion. A millisecond of silence followed as disbelief reigned. Then the security people sprang into action and all hell broke loose. The waiter turned out to be the only tango crazie in the place, but it took a good hour and a half to figure that out.
Or three Bombays from the portable bar next door, if you want a more precise measure of the time.
How did the waiter slip the grenade through the security cordon, which included a metal detector and an X-ray machine? Unfortunately, he wasn’t around to tell us. My suspicion is that it had been brought inside and hidden a few days before, and that he picked it up with the tiramisu. I’d spotted him out of the corner of my eye as I was winding up my speech. He roused my suspicion by moving two or three times faster than any Italian waiter ever moves unless the kitchen is on fire.
Karen was the hero of the hour. Diplomats and hobnobbers swarmed to her. She handled it with her usual smooth poise, charming all these European men like a movie star. Ever the sensitive supportive male, I threw a few appreciative beams in her general direction while I sipped my gin. Somewhere between the first and second glass, the acting head of NATO, the French general of generals, Generale Mustard, waltzed over with his staff of sycophants and gave me the evil eye. Mustard didn’t have a mustache, but the ends of it would have been twirling if he did. He just about snarled as he called me “Monsieur Dick” and said that my speech lacked balance.
“That’s a relief,” I told him.
One of Mustard’s lackeys swallowed his tongue—probably fatal, considering where it had been. The generale made like all Frenchmen and beat a retreat. I heard a snicker behind me and turned to find Backass, the Papal security legate.
“A grave security blunder,” he intoned. “Heads should roll.”
“I was thinking of a much lower part of the anatomy,” I told him. I was feeling polite, so I didn’t mention that I’d seen him cowering under a table on the opposite side of the room.
The Italian detectives charged with investigating the incident eventually required my presence in a room down the hall that had been allocated for debriefing. I knew from my Navy career that the typical Italian police interview is long on circuitous questions and cannolis, short on sweat, but I could tell this one was going to be different as soon as I was led into the room. The detective in charge skittered around, practically bouncing off the walls with uncontrolled adrenaline. He stood all of five-two and had shaved his head; the blood vessels at the top pulsed bright blue and he looked a little like a bocce ball with legs. The detective sputtered in Italian that the country’s honor had been spit on by the incident. I didn’t disagree; the problem was that he seemed to blame this on me, hectoring me about my uninvited Glock so much I finally asked whether it would have been better to have left it at home. His head pulsed a few seconds, then he snapped his fingers and I was led away, interview over.
Foreigners are not allowed to carry weapons into the country without express permission. I’d skipped the paperwork, not only for the Glock, which as you probably know is a small hideaway-type personal weapon, but for my PK as well. I had to surrender the Glock to the forensics team conducting the investigation, who for some reason wouldn’t take my word or that of two hundred eyewitnesses that my bullet had nailed the tango. They’ll undoubtedly send it back when they finish their work, which with typical Italian efficiency will be about thirty years from now.
The truth is, I doubt anyone smuggling a gun into the country would be in serious legal danger, at least not if they got a jury trial. Italy is enlightened enough to have passed a law allowing homeowners to shoot any and all intruders, simply on the grounds of being in a bad mood. You have to love a land that puts pain-in-the-ass in-laws on par with robbers.
Karen was still enjoying the fawning attentions of assorted NATO pooh-bahs when I found her. We retreated and once more took the winding road north to our hotel castle, where a complimentary bottle of champagne had been delivered to our suite, courtesy of the American ambassador who’d been in the ballroom. We spent a few hours unwinding, then slept in the next morning, getting up around mezzogiorno for Chianti and lunch. Karen wanted to get in more sightseeing before another round of the gratuitous violence that passed for receptions and cocktail parties at the NATO wingding. I told her I was in the mood for a little sightseeing myself.
“I’d like to see St. Peter’s and the Vatican,” she said. “What do you want to see?”
Some questions can only be answered with a smile.
We compromised: After a half hour upstairs, we boarded the Ferrari and sped down to Vatican City, the gallbladder-size Catholic state wedged into the pancreas of Rome. At one time, the Catholic Church owned or dominated a good hunk of the Italian peninsula, including Rome, but during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it lost most of its territory to Italian nationalists under Garibaldi. People don’t remember him for this, but Mussolini actually won a great deal of admiration for working out a settlement with the church during the early days of his regime that created Vatican City and ended decades of angst and turmoil. If he’d done the honorable thing and retired after that, his fat ass would never have ended on a butcher’s meat hook a decade later. Then again if he’d done the honorable thing, he wouldn’t have been Mussolini.
Basilica is Italian for “big fucking church.” And St. Peter’s is a big big fucking church. The outside looks more like a monster bank than your typical house of worship. Two huge semicircles of columns hold the square before it in place, and the doorways look as if they were designed for people the size of the Jolly Green Giant. You will not doubt your position in the universe when you stand in front of it—you are a puny little ant.
No, it was not the first t
ime Demo Dick had ever set foot in a church. Yours truly attended St. Ladislaus Hungarian Catholic School, where the nuns taught readin’ and writin’ the old-fashioned way—they pounded it into us with the help of razor-edged rulers and lead-weighted rosary beads. I still carry some of the scars, but at least when I go into a church I can genuflect in the right places. And my ecclesiastical background makes me understand that Jesus died on the cross for our sins; if I do not sin, he may have died in vain. Hard on my body, but somebody has got to do it.
St. Peter’s is bigger than a football stadium, if you can imagine a football stadium with walls made out of marble and enough candles to heat a small town. Every saint worthy of the name and a few who aren’t have a relic or a statue inside. Michelangelo designed the dome and contributed the Pietà, and just for good measure painted the ceiling next door in his spare time. The side aisles are lined with chapels and altar areas, each of which could be the centerpiece of a church anywhere else in the world.
Karen and I threaded our way through a patchwork of tour groups as we made our way down the center aisle toward the Papal Altar and the Baldacchino, a massive, four-pillared monument beneath the dome. It looks like a holy canopy bed and sits in front of the entrance to St. Peter’s tomb. The Baldacchino is the focal point of the basilica, the center of Catholicism’s spiritual traffic circle. Behind it sits St. Peter’s Chair, another huge altar at the back of the church. Made out of gold and bronze, it looks like the exhaust of a Scud missile taking off in the sun, which I pointed out to Karen.
She rolled her eyes. Some people just don’t understand art.
“Do you want to see the grottoes?” she asked, changing the subject. The grottoes are a collection of papal burial crypts and chapels below the main floor of the church. I see enough dead people in my line of work, and had no desire to go underground to see any more. We agreed to meet upstairs on the roof in an hour and a half. (Besides a great view, the roof has a number of religious shops. At one time you could just about buy your way to heaven there, but now the best you can do is a St. Christopher’s medal blessed by the pope.) I wandered away, continuing to survey the basilica’s art with my keenly developed connoisseur’s eye. Some of the most beautiful women in the world graced the church, and gazing at them was nothing less than a religious experience.
You pray your way and I’ll pray mine.
Easter was several weeks off, but the church was already being prepared for what amounts to Christendom’s Super Bowl extravaganza. Wires, lights, and speakers were scattered around the nave; here and there the skeletons of pew boxes were piled high. They look pretty sturdy once they’re put together, but unassembled they’re more like the stands you see on the side of the typical jayvee football field, dented and forlorn. Workers armed with architectural drawings and large thermoses of cappuccino gathered at several strategic locations, alternately furling and unfurling their plans. Every so often one of the men would do something constructive, like pick his nose, but for the most part they spent their time shaking their heads and staring at their papers.
A choral group had assembled in the Chapel of St. Sebastian. They began warming up with a few slightly off-key choruses of “Gloria with an Excedrin Headache.” The singing brought tears to my eyes—it was that bad—so I turned to head in the opposite direction. As I did I nearly got run over by two workmen rushing across the front of the nearby altar, huffing and puffing as they pushed a large speaker across the floor. Something about the workers struck me as odd, but I had to stare for a few seconds before I realized what it was: They were actually working hard enough to break into a sweat.
That’s not only unusual in Italy, there are several laws against it.
Curiosity piqued, I followed. A group of Philippine tourists cut in front of me, and by the time I sorted through them the workers had vanished. They had left their speaker box next to the Altar of St. Thomas—he was the only apostle with the balls enough to say seeing is believing.
I put my hand up against the speaker box and it rolled freely across the floor. Not only that, but the grill was hinged at the side and secured by a magnetic latch similar to what you might use on a kitchen cabinet or closet. The interior was empty; the front speaker was just a cardboard disk.
I was puzzling over that when four nuns in heavy wool habits and thick five-o’clock shadows beelined out of the passage behind the nearby altar, heads bowed beneath their headpieces as they whisked forward like running backs in a wedge formation. My first thought was that they had just come from one of the Vatican’s exorcism classes, where they’d gotten some of their prayers mixed up. Then I had a flash of ancient déjà vu, as if I were back in grammar school and needed to find a plausible substitute for the “dog ate my homework” line. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had pulled out a yardstick and whacked me across the face with it.
A Beretta submachine gun—now that surprised me.
I threw myself over the nearby altar rail and rolled to the ground as one of the nuns teased the trigger on the submachine gun. Someone shouted and the chorus’s “hallelujah’s” one chapel over turned into a cascade of “holy shit’s.” Instinctually, I reached for my gun—forgetting that I had surrendered it the night before.
Goatfucked. On vacation no less. See what happens when I go to church?
*The marketing department suggests a plug here for Rogue Warrior: Green Team, where some of these adventures unfolded.
2
I hope Sister Mary Jo Elephant is reading this, because I owe her a small tip of the nun’s habit for the inspiration that hit me next. Mary Jo was one of the nuns in sixth grade who supervised Confirmation class. Her forearms were thicker than my thighs, and if the sixth-grade class had fit on an altar, she could have bench-pressed it, kids and all. But Sister Mary Jo’s physical prowess wasn’t what inspired me while I was belly and cheek to the cold marble floor. I flashed on the last time I had kissed dust in a church, felled by a hymnal tossed at a hundred paces during one Confirmation practice when I broke operational silence to comment to a friend on the bodacious size of Billie Jean Tarlet’s nascent ta-tas. The lesson I had learned then wasn’t to keep my appreciation of the female anatomy to myself, but that your typical Catholic Church is stockpiled with weapons.
St. Peter’s, being the largest church in captivity, was a veritable armory. The first thing I noticed was a large incense urn dangling above my head, suspended from the ceiling by metal rods linked together. I climbed up on the altar and leapt out, aiming to grab the urn and swing across the chapel, where I planned to sprawl across the back of the nearest nun. The theory was good, but as my fingers grabbed the hanging urn I realized I had neglected to factor in the machinations of my old friend Mr. Murphy, whose rules dictate that anything that can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible moment.
Despite having an Irish last name, Murph was very comfortable being in Italy. He saw to it that the chain broke before I could get enough of my momentum on it to swing across the chapel. I landed ass-flat on the floor and slid forward on the well-polished marble. I hit the nun like a bowling ball taking out the top pin, sending her tumbling into a nearby reliquary. The glass case containing the mummified remains of a pope knocked the bastard cold.
The phony nun’s gun slid in the opposite direction. I dove after it.
By now it should be obvious to all that these weren’t Sisters of Charity looking for penance. (I would know since that was the order that nurtured my Slovak pretzel while attending St. Ladislaus in New Brunswick, NJ.) They were terrorists who’d come in hidden inside the fake speakers, helped by comrades disguised as workmen. So I’ll stop calling them nuns and damning the good sisters’ names.
One of the tangos ran over just as I pulled the weapon into my mitts and began firing. I squeezed off a burst and got him across the knees, dropping him just long enough for me to get a better shot and put him out of his misery. Then I took care of the bastard I’d bowled over earlier—no way I wanted to be blind-s
ided by a scumbag.
If you had the balls to climb all the way up to the ceiling and hang by your fingernails from the painted panels above the rotunda at the center of the church—assuming you had really sharp fingernails and could see through the pillars—you’d see a total of four four-man teams of terrorists, dressed in either nuns’ habits or workmen’s outfits, moving through the nave or center of the church. I’m with group number one near the first side altar to the right. Two of the four are dead nearby; the other two are heading after a tour group from Germany that has bolted in the direction of the main doors at the front of the church, a considerable distance away. You can tell that the tour group isn’t going anywhere, because tango quartet number two is pulling out its instruments for an improvisational number near the entrance. Tango group three has corralled some Japanese tourists near the Tomb of Gregory XIII, which is about halfway down the nave on your left. The last tango bunch has commandeered the area near the Pietà, which is an area close to the doors, on the left side of the church if you’re looking down from the dome. They have more than three dozen people on the floor near them.
People are running and crawling and diving and screaming throughout the rest of the building—there are about a half-dozen exits easily accessible from the main part of the church, and God only knows how many others lead outside from the labyrinth of rooms and hallways behind the main walls. The four or five hundred tourists inside the building when the firing began are using every one of them.
The security service’s emergency response team has rallied to the portico area, which is up near the doors.* (This is an armed security force present in the basilica while it’s open. They’re nominally undercover, mixing with the tourists. The people with the blazers who act as if they’re security people were actually unarmed; despite their titles they’re more like glorified tour guides with flashlights. Most are helping people find the way out; the others have been shot and are in various stages of dying.)
RW13 - Holy Terror Page 3
