The devils protege, p.15
THE DEVIL’S PROTÉGÉ, page 15
Isaiah, quickly festooning his assault weapon across his back, knocked aside the point of Giannopolous’s weapon with his foot and went after him with a series of hand blows and chops. A bladed hand came across in a horizontal arc and hit Giannopolous on the throat, crunching the esophagus. Then Isaiah rained down with fisted hands moving as blurs—faster and faster until Giannopolous’s eyes rolled upward. The man was still on his feet, though wavering in his stance, his knees about to give. When his eyes rolled until they showed nothing but slivers of white, Isaiah came across with a roundhouse kick that mercifully ended the man’s life. As Giannopolous was going to the floor, his finger pulled the trigger in reaction. The weapon began to strafe the walls, the ceiling, and the floor with the rounds peppering two of his teammates and wounding one, killing another. At the impact points, the fabric of their uniforms opened like the petals of blooming roses. Then Giannopolous, a large man, fell back and hit the floor hard.
* * *
On the east side of the chamber, Jeremiah was dealing with two men who were larger than he was, like two adults trying to manhandle a child, but were quickly emasculated by the Vatican Knight whose skill set was much more honed, much more sophisticated.
They pointed their weapons at Jeremiah, who lashed out with his weapon and knocked the points of both guns aside, the weapons thereafter going off in short bursts with the muzzle flashes illuminating the area in staccato eruptions of light, the bullets going wide of their intended mark. Then Jeremiah used the stock end of his weapon as a blunt instrument, first hitting the first target in the knee and the second in the hip—
. . . One-Two . . .
Both men were driven to the floor immediately with each man on a single knee and gritting against white-hot pain. Before they could regain their feet, Jeremiah directed the point of his weapon against both men and pulled the trigger, two quick rounds, one right after the other, with the precision shots catching both men directly above the bridge of their noses. Both fell to the floor like stones long before their minds could register their deaths. And being the wraith that Jeremiah was, he disappeared inside the shadows in search of prey.
* * *
Job, the German Knight who was a large man with freakish ability, dealt with three of Boosalis’s men, all large, all muscular, though they had little by way of any true combat skills. They pointed their weapons and set off gunfire. Their aim was wild as bullets peppered the wall and floor, missing Job who dove and rolled to the side as the bullets stitched along the ground after him, following him, the rounds almost catching up when Job strafed his weapon from left to right, then from right to left, his aim true as bullets punched through his targets to open fatal wounds in the chest and abdomen of his attackers who danced in an obscene jitter. In time, they went down hard and fast. And Job, like all Vatican Knights, sought the closest shadows to take refuge as battles continued to wage.
* * *
When Isaiah, Job, and Jeremiah were venturing through the veils of darkness, Kimball and Jonah were defending themselves against three hostiles. Kimball was combating one, whereas Jonah confronted two others.
Kimball’s target, a beefy man who had no real skill behind his techniques other than brute strength, came at Kimball screaming like an enraged warrior who spewed off a chain of obscenities in Greek. He raised his weapon at Kimball, who was merely a silhouette standing before him when he fired his weapon until the rifle started to sound off with dry clicks. As the smoke of the gunfire started to clear, the shape he was firing at was gone, nothing but space where the target once stood.
Narrowing his eyes in disbelief while ejecting the empty magazine to replace it with a fully loaded one, a hand came from behind, cupped his forehead, drew the head back to expose the throat, and a quick sweep of the knife to pare the flesh. Then the hand was gone, the shape was gone, nothing but empty surroundings as blood jettisoned from an open artery with every pump of the man’s heart. As the edges of his sight began to blur and turn purple as darkness closed in, the man went to the floor first on one knee and then the other. When his vision dissolved into a blackness that was absolute, he surrendered his life to the Eternal Shadows.
* * *
With Boosalis’s men unable to put up much of a contest that Cromwell had hoped for, Jonah was sharpening his teeth to battle two large men who used the quasi-shadows of the tunnel to search for the enemy with their weapons leveled before them. They lacked stealth or the ability to take on a fully trained military unit, nothing but street hacks who responded like the muscle of the mob rather than a militarily sophisticated team. They were sloppy in motion with neither in sync with the other man’s movements. And Jonah took full advantage of the moment. With Kimball having broken off to engage with Boosalis’s man, Jonah was chomping at the bit for a fight.
The two circled about, searching; became divided from each other, a cardinal sin; and then without realizing they had separated by becoming two separate one-man teams instead of a joint unit, it was easy for Jonah to zero in on the easiest prey, the one who walked inside the quasi-shadows. When Jonah moved within the shadows to close the gap, he had his knife ready and waiting with the serrated edge upward, and the keen-looking blade held downward.
As he closed the divide, his prey appeared nervous and lost, somehow knowing that something terrible lurked close by. The gunman stopped, searched, looking up and then sideways, sighting nothing. Then he backpedaled into a deeper and darker space, a mistake.
Jonah could see the man’s quick breathing that was close to hyperventilating. Then the man spoke softly, a Greek prayer mumbled under his breath.
. . . Five feet away . . .
. . . Four . . .
. . . Three . . .
Jonah hooked an arm around the man’s throat, pulled him close, and plunged his knife again and again into his back, the Vatican Knight’s appetite for destruction insatiable as the knife went in and out with manic and continuous stabbing.
. . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . .
Ropes of blood jettisoned from the wounds every time he retracted his weapon.
. . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . .
He could feel the warm droplets of blood spray over his face, around his lips.
. . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . .
While in this frenzy of killing, he allowed his tongue to wash the area around his lips, to taste the metallic scent of his victim’s blood.
. . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . .
As his victim’s arms dropped limply by his sides—
. . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . .
--Jonah let his quarry fall to the floor. Blood quickly began to pool underneath the body, the moment mesmerizing Jonah briefly before he forced himself from his reverie, knowing that there was another.
Like all Vatican Knights who were taught to use the shadows, he wove in between the shadows and the feeble light until he reached his final target, a man who was oblivious to his surroundings. He did not sense his predator, did not act appropriately as a soldier, but as a frightened man whose mind was becoming fragmented by fear.
Holding his knife firm, as the man entered his space, Jonah whispered, “Let me remove you from misery.”
And then the Vatican Knight eclipsed him, the man’s cries cut short.
Nothing but silence.
As the others waited in the shadows, Jonah, wiping his knife blade against the sleeve of his shirt, entered the central area of the corridor. Wiping the blade dry, he said, “It’s done. Everyone’s been neutralized.”
The Vatican Knights approached Jonah from all corners of the arena and closed in.
Bodies were everywhere, the smell of blood was strong and ripe, the smell of fresh kills.
After Jonah sheathed his weapon, everyone noticed that he was covered in blood, his uniform was saturated with it.
“Are you hurt?” Isaiah asked him.
“It’s not my blood.”
Kimball stepped forward and narrowed his eyes to focus on Jonah’s collar. It was no longer stark white, but red. There was no evidence to indicate that the collar had been any other color, no pinprick dots of white, no indications of purity—nothing but red.
“What the hell did you do?” Kimball asked.
“Nothing that any of you didn’t do. You neutralized the enemy for the sake of the mission, and so did I.”
The Vatican Knights looked at each other bearing signs of concern and mistrust.
Then evenly, Kimball said, “This was the second line of defense. Eyes and ears open. It gets harder from here on in.”
As the Vatican Knights headed down the corridor, Jonah, turning to join the team, was held up by Kimball who grabbed his forearm. Kimball, immediately retracting his hand, saw that his palm was red and tacky from the blood that soaked Jonah’s shirt.
And then from Kimball: “Stay by my side . . . Always. You got that?”
Before Jonah could respond, Kimball was already on the move.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
As the double explosions of the flash bangs were going off, Boosalis was watching from a secured spot at the end of the tunnel. He witnessed staccato bursts of light, then he heard men crying out in rage whereas others simply cried out. Worse, everything was followed by dead silence.
Having true power, Boosalis considered, was not to be taken for granted. In fact, it was a dark desire that fell in the realm of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ The price for obtaining absolute power in regard to dominion over life, it seems, came with a cost. The stakes of attaining to achieve what Cromwell proffered—those who lived or died by your hand—was made to sound like a desirous one when, in fact, the reality of it all was that the people in his orbit were dying. Cromwell had set him up by blinding him with false ambitions.
“That son of a bitch,” he murmured under his breath.
Cromwell wanted his team to serve as a buffer zone to whittle down the Vatican Knights and to make the contest more militarily feasible for Cromwell’s group to neutralize. Boosalis and his team were meant to be nothing more than red meat for the Vatican Knights, a team to be sacrificed for the good of William Cromwell’s true desire, which was all too clear.
Cromwell wanted Boosalis erased from the equation to ensure that he would not pose a threat to Cromwell in the future and to have his men intervene in a manner to weaken the opponent only to be terminated in the process, which also annihilated future threats of retaliation from surviving members so that Cromwell could resell the Scepter of Light on the black market and nearly double his money.
You son of a bitch!
Boosalis hastened his way to the master chamber with his fists clenching and unclenching.
Nobody messes with Alexandr Boosalis, he thought. Nobo—
Boosalis tripped a laser connected to a claymore, the action setting off the mine. Boosalis was lifted off his feet and carried across the tunnel where he bounced off a concrete wall and landed on the floor, the man sensing white-hot pain as it coursed through his wracked body. Every nerve-ending, every fiber of his being, was in pure agony. When he lifted a hand to touch his face, something he was always so fond of when gazing at his reflection in the mirror, he could feel the tears and slices in his flesh. Despite the pain, this bothered him the most, that a single action had turned him into a monster, his features now grotesque.
As he lay there, he began to sob, a mixture of pain and sorrow, wondering how such a man of his high-bred quality could be so easily duped.
For the pursuit of absolute power, a voice told him.
Boosalis, in tears, continued to mourn over his stupidity of romanticizing a foolish dream that would never be.
CHAPTER FORTY
The sound of the explosion was distant and muted.
Ben Peyton, along with Abbot, Beckingham, Barrett, and four others heard the claymore go off.
“You hear that, boys,” Beckingham said. “Bloody music to my ears is what it is.”
“I assume, Mr. Beckingham, that was the claymore you neglected to inform Mr. Boosalis about as you were escorting him to the front line of defense.” This response came from William Cromwell, who emerged from the shadows to join his unit. In his hand was an HK MP5, the SAS’s weapon of choice. “One claymore goes off,” he continued, “inside the L-tunnel but not in the others. That, to me, Mr. Beckingham, is indicative that someone in Boosalis’s team took flight in the aftermath of the engagement, perhaps Mr. Boosalis himself.”
Beckingham nodded in agreement. “I did as you told me, which was to show Boosalis all the trip mines but the one. If it was the Vatican Knights, there would be no way to set off one and not the others.”
“Agreed,” said Cromwell. “Curious, however, to see who survived the engagement. Perhaps more than one. What I need to know is how many of the enemy Boosalis’s team were able to neutralize.” When Cromwell started to head for L-tunnel, he stated over his shoulder, “Do guard the relic with everything you have until I return. I will be but a moment.”
“Do you need backup?” Peyton asked.
“The first prearrangement of trip mines has not been set off, meaning that the opponent remains behind enemy lines. Those who set off the L-tunnel claymore is one of our own.”
“Then you’ll need backup,” Peyton insisted.
“I need you to stay and do as I say. Guard the relic.” Then Cromwell was swallowed by the shadows.
* * *
Alexandr Boosalis had crawled a good distance along the floor leaving a ribbon trail of blood behind him. Breathing with a horrible wetness that sounded like a death rattle, he stopped when he came to a pair of military boots that obstructed his path. Rolling onto his back and looking up, he saw Cromwell standing over him with a smile of malicious amusement. In his hands was an HK MP5.
Bending down so that he was hunkering over Boosalis, Cromwell clucked his tongue and said, “My poor man. By the looks of you, you’re not looking too good. Did you happen to come across a claymore? Why, of course, you did.”
When Boosalis raised a bloodied hand at Cromwell, the SAS operative fell out of Boosalis’s reach. “You used me, you son of a bitch.”
“I’m a soldier. I’ve been groomed to look for weaknesses in my enemy.”
“I’m not your enemy.”
“The moment you admonished me with threats was the tipping point of our business relationship. I gave you my word that the staff would be delivered to you despite the setbacks. And yet you continued to proffer me with threats. And no one, not even a man with your power and reach, threatens me or a member of my staff. That was your folly, Mr. Boosalis, and an opportunity for my gain.” After a pause, Cromwell added, “You and those who shielded you will no longer pose a threat to me from anywhere at any time. The Scepter of Light now belongs to me.”
“You—” Boosalis cut himself off.
“What? A son of a bitch. I believe you already called me that. Is your vocabulary limited?”
Boosalis clenched his bloodied hand into a fist.
“Now-now, Mr. Boosalis. Not to worry. The Scepter of Light will find a good home, believe me. There are others willing to pay much for the relic. Not as much as you, however. But enough, nonetheless.”
When Boosalis dropped his arm, and with his hand slapping hard against the concrete with a wet sound, Cromwell asked, “Tell me, were your men able to stave off the enemy?”
Boosalis remained silent. He merely stared at Cromwell from stark white eyes that were set against a torn and bleeding face, now a horrific mask.
“I knew you were a coward,” Cromwell told him. “That was clearly visible to me. And I know that you’re afraid of dying. That, too, is clear to me.” Cromwell tilted his head slowly as though examining the distorted contours of Boosalis’s face, the flaps of skin. “There’s not much I can do about your once pretty face, I’m afraid, but I can save your life if you give me your word that once this is over, we go our separate ways without reprisal. Again, I will remind you that the adage in regard to Alexandr Boosalis, meaning you, is that once Alexandr Boosalis gives his word, he keeps it. Does that still hold true if I save your life?”
Clenching his teeth so that the muscles in the back of his jaw worked, Boosalis nodded ‘yes.’
“You wouldn’t be lying to me now, would you, Mr. Boosalis?”
This time, he nodded ‘no.’
“Excellent,” said Cromwell. “Then if you want me to save your life, Mr. Boosalis, you must tell me about the enemy. How many did your team take out if any?”
“All of them.”
Cromwell, analyzing the micro tics of Boosalis’s torn face, said, “That’s a lie, Mr. Boosalis. So, let’s try again. And keep in mind that my patience is running thin. If the enemy remains, if they attack us, there’s no way I can save your life, now is there?”
Boosalis appeared to mull this over. Then: “I saw the muzzle flashes and heard the screams, all coming from my men.”
“But none from the enemy?”
“You purposely sent them in to be slaughtered—to hopefully bring down the numbers of the opposing side so your men could deal with the rest.”
“Very good assessment, Mr. Boosalis.”
“Yeah. That’s why you said that those who once shielded me will no longer pose a threat to you from anywhere at any time.”
“Again, very perceptive. At least you were listening to me in your moments of obvious pain. That’s quite impressive. However, you really didn’t give me the answer I was looking for. The Vatican Knights, you have no idea how many remain, given that you, being the coward that you are, left your unit behind. Is that right?”
