Shortstuff whistled. When I looked over, he gave me a thumbs-up. Then in true Rogue Warrior style, he flashed a military-perfect three-finger salute.
Minus two fingers, of course.
I returned the salute, then shoved the speaker forward. A barrage of 9mm bullets splintered it into pieces, the tangos burning their mags on the easy target. The speaker tipped, fell, and crashed under the torrent.
At least I think it did. Checking my handiwork wasn’t on the agenda. Instead I raced to St. Sebastian’s Altar, looking to shimmy my way up the marble columns. It took about two seconds to realize that wasn’t going to work, but I did find a way to wedge my feet against the rectangular side panel and my back against the marble, and in that way pushed up to the first ledge above the altar. From there I stood and just managed to grab the fancy marble scroll things at the top of the column, using them to haul myself up to the ledge that ran around the side of the chapel.
At that point, Mr. Murphy intervened in the person of a corrupt seventeenth-century marble dealer, who had foisted cheap stone off on the pope. The first scroll had held my weight easily; I pulled myself up and scrambled to the side arch. The next move was to get around a large archway and into the upper alcove area, where I could climb up the side of a thick pier at least partly blocked from the gunmen. To get there, I had to hang my ass out over the middle of the church, an easy target for a second or two. As I sized up my approach, I noticed the thick marble and figured I’d use it to swing around into the niche, where I’d be protected by a statue of a saint. It would have worked perfectly, too, except that the marble broke in two as soon as I trusted it with my weight.
I had just enough momentum to grab the bottom of the statue as I fell. I slapped my chin and face against the stone base beneath the niche but hung on, so I didn’t complain. Much.
Dangling thirty or forty feet off the ground, I was an easy target for the tangos up in the dome, and they commenced trying to write their names in my backside. Shortstuff distracted them with covering fire long enough for me to scramble up behind the saint’s cape. But getting across to the next niche was impossible; they weren’t cut symmetrically and there was nothing to grab on to to swing across. So instead I climbed onto the saint’s shoulders, grabbed the column top—more fancy scroll stuff—and pulled upward, praying as I did that the contractor’s wares had been properly inspected before installation. This time the marble held, and maybe because of Shortstuff and his pistol, the gunmen didn’t try getting a good angle to fire at me. Their blasts chipped the hell out of the columns a few feet away, but missed me.
I climbed up over a foot-wide ledge and pulled myself onto one a few feet higher and three or four times as wide. Large spotlights sat in a track at the lip. Twelve feet above that ledge was a wide galley with even larger spotlights mounted on thick stands. I hung my butt out and started to climb. As I got my hands on the top ledge, 9mm slugs began poking at the marble nearby. The bullets missed, but the chips peppered my side as I scrambled upward and over the low wall at the edge of the galley, pulling the Beretta submachine gun from the makeshift bandolier as I rolled onto the floor. I spun over and got to my knee. One of the tangos was running toward me from the direction of the dome. Our eyes met for a second, and I saw his flash with fear, as if he’d finally realized what a world of shit he’d gotten himself into. I yanked up the Beretta to fire, but before I could he threw himself behind one of the nearby light poles.
Chickenshit move, but it saved his ass.
Temporarily. He was between me and the windows I wanted to go through. Gun trained on his hiding place, I ran toward him, waiting until I could get a decent shot. As I closed in, he jumped back out into the walkway. A burst from the Beretta encouraged him to continue off the edge. He flew toward the cathedral floor, landing with a splat so loud I heard it as I broke the glass on one of the windows.
The windows open onto the main part of the roof. It looks more like a strange theme park of spiked fences and miniature buildings than a roof. The dome sits at the center, topped by a cupola that’s sometimes called St. Peter’s Crown. Imagine the Capitol dome in Washington with one less set of windows and you have a rough idea what the dome on St. Peter’s looks like. There are a set of large windows and columns that circle the base. They rise from a stone wall about ten or twelve feet over the roof. There are stairways to the roof, but I simply jumped up onto the bricks covering one of the utility entrances and climbed from there to the base.
If you look up at the dome windows from the floor of St. Peter’s, they seem crystal clear. Light flows through them, glittering off the gold-plated artwork below. Up close, though, they’re covered with a thick layer of Roman soot. I rubbed enough of the grime away to see a large blur on the balcony across from me, and two less distinct ones to the right. One of the smaller blurs moved to my right; his companion followed.
They left something behind. I couldn’t tell what it was, but I suspected it was a bomb.
I leaned closer to the window, pressing my face and hands against it. As I did, the framework holding the pane in place gave way and the entire window assembly crumbled, which sent me flying into the church, sailing toward the floor three hundred something feet below.
*I’m making some of the details of the security arrangements vague and slightly misleading, just in case some arse decides to use my words as a blueprint for destruction. Doom on you, fuckhead!
*The translation is rather free.
*On paper, this looks a lot more dangerous for the hostage than it was in real life. I was holding the gun, remember, in my hand, and had a clear shot. His weapon was alongside her head and he was looking at me; he’d’ve had to look away and move his hand to actually shoot her. By that time he was dead.
3
I can’t say my life flashed before my eyes, but the floor of the cathedral certainly did. Then my right foot snagged the lead frame of the window just enough to change my direction. I threw my hand out to grab the rail—instinct and reflexes, no conscious thought involved at all. I missed, slapping my forehead against the metal pipe instead. I took harder shots on dates when I was a teenager; nonetheless this one cleared the fog from my brain. I folded like a deck chair, fortunately on the balcony that surrounds the dome.
My ears were ringing, and the sound had a very familiar rasp to it. If I didn’t know any better, I would have sworn it was the voice of Roy Boehm, the creator of the SEALs. Boehm served as my tutor and patron saint, and it’s always his eloquent, refined voice I hear in the dark days of my soul.
What he says isn’t very profound, but it is direct: Attack! Attack! ATTACK! You fucking piece of whaleshit! Off the deck and fight like a man.
Boehm never gave me an order that didn’t require immediate compliance. I swung the submachine gun up and began firing at the two tangos immediately in front of me. Both died with something other than smiles on their faces, but I didn’t have time to admire my handiwork—Murphy slipped his fingers into the Beretta and jammed the son of a bitch about halfway through the mag.
There’s a CIA analyst in the basement of Langley who’s cheering as he reads this, not because he hates me but because it means that the boom business in terrorism has caused standards in training and equipment to decline. To him, my borrowed submachine gun is a welcome waypoint on a downward slope plotting the bad guys’ inevitable decline and fall.
Personally, I would have felt a hell of a lot better if the trend line ran through a different weapon, namely the one belonging to the tango opposite me on the cupola walkway. I did my best impression of a fish out of water, flipping forward and diving behind the fallen bodies of his comrade as the bastard did some touchup work on the nearby frescoes. One of his bullets creased my pants leg, and another singed my butt.
Which not only hurt, but pissed me off. Shoot me in the head, shoot me in the heart, but don’t try to butt-fuck me or there’ll be hell to pay.
I flattened my body parts against the floor behind the dead terrorists,
their bodies jumping with the 9mm slugs their friend was spitting from across the way. Neither of the slimers had a weapon that I could see, and I wasn’t in a position to frisk them.
Shortstuff chose this moment to appear with one of his men at the entrance to the balcony. Never have I felt so glad to see a hairy Italian in my life. The tango on the other side of the dome did not share my enthusiasm and spent the rest of his mag chasing Shortstuff back into the archway. I jumped to my feet, determined to rush him before he could reload. But instead of fishing out a new box of bullets he climbed up on the protective screen around the railing and jumped.
If he had jumped to his death I would have personally paid for his funeral…after I stomped on his squished remains. But instead of going downward, he leapt toward the ledge under the nearby window, swung one of his legs up and managed to scramble upright and then through the window. (Give the devil his due—that ledge has to be twelve or more feet over the floor of the balcony, and just to grab the slippery marble and hoist yourself takes enormous finger strength. And frankly it’s easier to fall over that security screen than it is to leap over the top. But fear is a powerful motivator.)
“Look for bombs,” I shouted to Shortstuff, jumping onto the screen to copy the tango’s monkey routine.
“There’s a door—that way,” yelled the Italian, pointing a short distance.
Well, duh.
I ran through it out into the hallway, ducked right and left. Shortstuff yelled again, but I didn’t hear what he said. Most likely it was something along the lines of: You don’t have a weapon with you, asshole.
Which wasn’t the same as being unarmed. The terrorist who’d gone through the window had fallen or jumped from the stone base down to the roof. When I got out, he was just getting himself up, limping as if he’d busted his ankle or trashed his knees. Driven by adrenaline, he began running toward the front of the church.
By now, the Italian military and police response teams called in to back up the Vatican people had finished their coffee breaks and were en route. A pair of gunships, Augusta A129 Mangustas (basically Apaches with garlic breath) whipped down from the north, the spearhead of a larger flock of aircraft, including two Chinook choppers loaded with assault teams.
The roof of the basilica looks like a little city. The roof of the nave or the center aisle of the church looks like a long building in the center. It’s flanked by fences and odd-shaped structures. The tango took a turn around one and veered toward the nave, heading in the direction of a workman’s ladder. I caught up in time to get a kick in the face. He hauled himself up onto the roof, when I clambered up behind him he was retrieving a pistol from beneath his coveralls.
I had one of two choices—jump back down, or throw myself forward in a wild attempt to knock the gun out of his hands before he got a chance to fire. I chose the latter, which raises the inevitable question: Which is faster? A speeding bullet, or Demo Dick?
That day, at least, it worked out to a draw, as my fist arrived in the tango’s midsection just as he began firing. Bullets flew past me, the gun flew to the side, and tango and I tumbled toward the side of the roof.
And kept tumbling. After three or four spins, we went our separate ways. He flew to the left of a small hip roof and sailed off into a fence, striking the top railing hard enough to split his head like a crushed grape.
And moi, or Io as the Eye-talians would say?
I didn’t go anywhere. The bandolier I’d fashioned from my belt snagged me upside down in the gutter as I headed face-first toward the terraced roof. One second I was poised to fly through the air like Superman. The next second I was still there, waiting for my close-up.
By the time I got myself unhooked, the SWAT team was fast-roping from the Chinook forty or fifty yards away. Shortstuff and his team surrounded the now-dead tango, and then turned their attention to me.
“We’re getting a ladder,” he yelled. “Don’t let go!”
I wasn’t planning on it.
When everything was sorted out, it looked like this: Four four-man groups of terrorists had come into the cathedral, posing as workmen and clergy and using the fake speaker boxes to carry their weapons. The idea had apparently been to capture as many tourists as possible, then probably kill them and themselves. They had not brought explosives with them; the shadow I’d seen on the dome balcony turned out to be a backpack with extra mags for their guns. Considering what could have happened, things had gone extremely well. Even so, four of Shortstuff’s men and eight unarmed security people had been killed, with two others wounded. Six tourists had been killed and fifteen or seventeen* wounded in the attack. Tour guides and unarmed security people had managed to lead most of the civilians to safety, and while the press seemed to forget them in the brouhaha that followed, I won’t. In many cases, the guides had not been properly trained on evacuation procedures and used their common sense to quickly find the nearest exits or secure hiding places. Just as important, they remained calm. I’m sure the families of the people they led to safety realize how much they owe them.
Not one of the tangos had survived. My fault to a large degree, I know. If I had thought about it, I might have tried to save two or three of them for deep-fried interrogation, heating their balls over a vat of boiling olive oil to get some useful information. But you don’t get do-overs in this business. And the investigation of the “terroriste diabolice” as the media called them wasn’t my concern. My own take was that the group had been fairly incompetent; if I went to all that trouble, I would have made damn sure to bring a few explosives inside to make a more permanent comment on the architecture.
Karen and I had a reunion in the Governor’s Palace next to the cathedral, where I’d gone with Shortstuff to debrief. Backass arrived a short while later, thanking me profusely for helping avert a catastrophe. He was so excited that his English was a little hard to understand, but I think at one point he may have offered me a cardinal’s pointy hat. I turned him down, though I did accept one of his business cards and promised I’d stay in touch. Even God can make use of the devil sometimes. I finished telling the police and military intelligence people what I knew, then left with Karen to find a pair of pants without air-conditioning back at the hotel.
The excitement of the afternoon meant I missed my appointment with Shakespeare, the MI6 officer I’d met the night before. Unfortunately, he couldn’t reschedule: En route to the café where we’d arranged to meet, he was hit by a truck. At the time, the fact that the vehicle ran up onto a curb to strike him and then sped away didn’t seem particularly noteworthy to the Rome police; they handled two or three similar cases every week. Shakespeare’s official cover made him appear to be just a businessman, and by all appearances he was just an unlucky SOB. The police report called it an accident.
To be honest, it may have been. MI6 later conducted its own investigation and came up with nothing. The typical Roman at the wheel makes the worst Boston cabbie look like a grandmother on her way to a Sunday afternoon tea, and truck drivers are even worse. But considering everything that happened afterward, I’d put even money on his death not being the result of typical Roman indifference to pedestrians.
The information he was going to share about Saladin died with him. If anyone else in MI6 knew anything about it, they didn’t come forward to volunteer it, and as it turned out I wasn’t in a position to ask around.
It did cross my mind that afternoon that the thwarted takeover of the basilica might have been the big event Saladin’s communiqué promised. But I doubted it. Like most of the people who knew about him, I thought Saladin was more than likely a blowhard wannabe whose only asset was a computer and some hacking skills.
Backass decided to honor my basilica climbing with an Italian-style reception the next evening, replete with plenty of cheek kissing and Asti. I was starting to OD on Roman hospitality but Karen wore down my resistance during a pleasant lunch at a hilltop trattoria a few miles from the hotel; Backass had hinted that the pope might attend
and even I couldn’t turn down a chance to meet the pontiff. When we got back to the hotel, we discovered that Backass had sent a Vatican Mercedes to take us into town; the armored sedan was nice, but what won me over was the fully stocked bar in the back. After instructing the driver on how high to fill my glass with Bombay, Karen and I started upstairs to change. We were about halfway to the elevator when someone shouted my name. I turned around, and found myself confronted by six large men with bad buzz cuts, all clearly American. They were well dressed; their dark suits matched and none of their Kevlar was showing.
“What’s this? An escort?” I asked.
A squeaky voice answered. “Richard Marcinko, aka Demo Dick, aka Rogue Warrior?”
“AKA, who are you?” I asked. I couldn’t spot who was talking behind the wall of flesh, though I did notice a flurry of movement behind me. Several men stepped out from the statues on either side of the elevator.
“Richard Marcinko, you are under arrest,” continued the squeaky voice. The wall parted and a man in an Air Force uniform stepped through. He stood about six-three and weighed, oh, maybe a hundred and ten pounds counting the uniform and the briefcase he had in his right hand.
“Who the hell are you?”
He introduced himself as Major Squeakynuts,* and declared that I would come with him.
“Why the fuck would I do that?” I asked.
“Because there’s twelve of us and one of you,” said Squeakynuts. “And you wouldn’t want resisting arrest to be added to the charges against you.”
Squeakynuts turned out to be a U.S. Air Farcer from the Office of Special Investigations and Thumb Sucking. After a fruitful exchange of obscenities, I discovered that I was suspected—suspected, not charged—with violating security at the Air Fart’s rest stop for nukes at Sigonella in Sicily.
RW13 - Holy Terror Page 5
