2013: Beyond Armageddon Read online

  Father Boyle rolled it back up and handed it to him. “So you don’t mind having the jinni follow you around for the rest of your life?”

  Tarik made a dismissive wave and put the stopper back in the jar.

  “Fifteen thousand,” Boyle said.

  “Seventy-five.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Sixty.”

  “Thirty.”

  “Fifty. Take it or leave it.”

  “Wait here.”

  He closed the door behind him and went into Donatelli’s office, already thinking of ways to cover his tracks. The odor of spices and incense that had once been sold here still lingered. They combined with the cheap cologne the old man bathed in to create the smell of something going bad.

  It took barely a minute to pop the lock and forge the check. He had just inserted the paper clip to lock the desk drawer back up when he heard the familiar irritating slide of slippers coming down the hall.

  He yanked on the paper clip. It was stuck. The footsteps were at the door. He jammed the check in his pocket and left the paper clip dangling.

  Donatelli came through the doorway in his stained pajamas, eyes blinking against the light, wisps of white hair sticking up wildly from his liver-spotted scalp. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. Boyle hurried to intercept him.

  “What are you doing in my office?”

  “I was doing some work on those new materials and couldn’t find my magnifying glass. I thought you might have left yours on your desk.”

  “What kind of paleographer loses his magnifying glass?”

  “A tired one.” Donatelli shuffled toward his desk. Father Boyle walked ahead of him. “I’m sorry I woke you. We should both go to bed. Those fragments will need all of our concentration.”

  “I’ve been telling you that.” Donatelli looked at his desk as if to see if anything was amiss, eyes blinking as they tried to focus. He drifted behind the desk. The light from the pole lamp glinted off the paper clip. The priest hurried to click the light off, leaving only the dim light that spilled in from the hallway.

  “Come, Monsignor, let’s go to bed. I will have the coffee ready for you in the morning.”

  Donatelli allowed himself to be led from the room. “Stay out of my office unless I am here. You know I like everything just so.”

  “Yes. I will. Good night.”

  Father Boyle watched the stooped old man become a silhouette down the hall. He heard his own office door open behind him. Tarik came out and saw the figure disappearing into the darkness.

  “Who is that? I thought you said—”

  “It is a priest visiting from Bethlehem. He is staying in the Monsignor’s room while he is away.” The Bedouin’s dark eyes bore into him. The priest reached into his pocket. “Here.”

  Tarik studied the check, then said, “I was not here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You never saw me tonight. There was no scrolls.”

  Father Boyle started to ask why but thought better of it. He knew the most likely reason. Tarik had found his scroll far outside the territory of his Ta’amireh tribe. All assets were supposed to be given to his sheikh, who would then decide how to divide them up. Tarik didn’t want to share. The priest didn’t blame him. Neither did he.

  At the door the Bedouin lingered a moment. Father Boyle saw something in his face. Concern, perhaps. “What is it, Tarik?”

  “There is more to these scrolls than meets the eye.”

  Father Boyle frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “They have a power. Something about it. Something not good. I felt it in the cave. Like something guarding the jar, something that did not want me to take it. Did you not feel it?”

  Bedouin were superstitious, but no more so than many groups he’d studied. There had been that ominous sigh when Tarik opened the jar…“No. Only the power of the words.”

  Tarik stared at him for a long uncomfortable moment. “Very well,” he said. “My conscience is clear.” He disappeared into the darkness.

  The Bedouin’s words nagged at the priest, but back at his desk he quickly became absorbed by what he’d deciphered:

  I am Lot, nephew to Abraham. God hath sent his two most trusted angels to lead us safely west from Zoar to this cave.

  Tarik’s parting words came back to him, and he felt a growing unease.

  He stared at the jar, aching to get to work on the scroll, but it would have to wait. He needed to start fresh, not when he was barely able to keep his eyes open. Its secrets would have to wait a little longer. He hid the jar behind some books and went to bed.

  In the twilight world between sleep and wakefulness, he saw a shadow in the corner of the room. For a moment he thought Donatelli might have wandered in, but the shadow was far too big. He was so exhausted he tried to ignore it, but each time he opened his eyes it was still there. And each time it was closer.

  He clicked on the lamp by his bed.

  Nothing.

  Turning off the light, he put his pillow over his head. Listening to the darkness, he almost expected to hear breathing. A gust of wind rattled his window, then all was quiet. The silence seemed different, stealthy somehow, and he was unable to shake the feeling of being watched.

  Tarik and his mumbo-jumbo. There were no such things as jinn.

  He took the pillow off his head. Nothing moved in the darkness. The window rattled again. He looked toward it. Two fiery red dots hovered outside. The priest’s eyes locked onto them, trying to figure out what they were.

  Cigarettes of soldiers on patrol? Some kind of reflection? The eyes of a bird?

  Eyes.

  An instant later they were gone. Father Boyle pulled the pillow back over his head and tried to convince himself he had been imagining things.

  He could not.

  CHAPTER 2

  Washington, D.C. Christmas Day, 1972

  “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritu Sancti.”

  The priest made the sign of the cross on nine-year-old Zeke Sloan’s forehead. The boy’s mother, holding her son’s hand as they rolled toward the emergency room, knew that wasn’t a good sign. Extreme Unction called for the anointing of all five senses, unless the priest thought there wasn’t time. Then he only did the forehead.

  Extreme Unction. The Last Anointing. With Herculean effort she shoved that boulder from her mind, but another one quickly rolled in to replace it.

  Her husband’s plane had been shot down yesterday in a bombing raid over Hanoi. The Air Force was looking for Hank, but—

  I can’t lose them both, Rita thought. I can’t.

  Zeke’s closed eyelids fluttered as the priest gently forced the communion wafer into his mouth. The gurney stopped at the ER doors. One of the emergency team saw what the priest was doing and shook her head. There wasn’t time for the wine.

  The priest took his hand off the cruet as the boy was whisked through the swinging doors. “God bless and keep your soul,” he said, hoping the blessing would catch up to the fast-disappearing gurney.

  Rita Sloan turned to follow through the still-swinging doors. Before going in she stopped and turned. “What is your name, Father?”

  “Connolly. James Connolly.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Thank you, Father Connolly.”

  She rushed into the emergency room. A nurse hurrying by tried to intercept her. “I’m sorry ma’am, you can’t—”

  “I’m his mother. I’m staying. I’ll keep out of the way.”

  The nurse looked to the nearest doctor for help. He shrugged and a circle of green-clad ER personnel closed around Zeke. His mother found a spot several feet behind and kept glancing nervously at the heart monitor. Her son’s heartbeat was weak and irregular.

  Why did I have to get him a sled for Christmas?

  Thank God for Freddie. Zeke’s best friend had come running to tell her that a car had slammed into Zeke at the bottom of his very first run.

  The beep of the heart monitor suddenly became a continuous h
um. Rita looked at the flat line in horror. Someone called out an emergency procedure she couldn’t understand. Several people sprang into action. Every cell in her body screamed that a mother should go to her son, but she willed herself to stay out of the way. The defibrillator was rolled into place. Rita’s burning eyes kept flicking from the heart monitor to her son’s closed eyes, while six strangers worked frantically to bring Zeke back from the dead.

  In a single instant all the power went out and the room went black.

  Zeke floated in a pure white cloud of nothingness. He felt as if a pair of arms were cradling him, holding him suspended in midair. From somewhere above came a soothing voice:

  “I am the one who sits nearest the throne of glory. He has sent me to bless and keep you, Ezekiel. You shall be put to the supreme test. If you pass, you shall become the portal through which the Messiah will come. You are the beginning and the end.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Vietnam, near Dien Bien Phu. September 13, 1993. 2330 hours

  Captain Zeke Sloan led his eight-man Delta Strike Force team quietly through the jungle. Night-vision goggles enabled them to see clearly as they pushed through smothering humidity and a leafy curtain of darkness. A tiny sliver of moon hung overhead like the blade of a scythe. The maniacal zing of insects sounded a scream of protest. Or warning.

  So far so good. The HALO—high altitude/low opening—insertion had come off without a hitch. Jumping from 25,000 feet and not opening their parachutes until just under 4,000, they had been impossible to detect while making a pinpoint landing on the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

  The clock had started ticking the moment they left the plane. They had—at most—a six-hour window before daylight would erase their advantage of being able to see in the dark. They couldn’t be sure who or what they might encounter, but eight American soldiers coming through the Vietnamese jungle in full combat gear would not be good. They had a lot of ground to cover and needed to get out before the sun came up. Period. The timing had to be flawless. Seconds would count.

  They bulled their way through three miles of thick woods and relentless underbrush that wanted to cling to every piece of equipment. Monkeys howled and screeched at the invaders into their territory. Zeke suppressed the thought that if anyone wanted to find his team, all they had to do was follow that sound.

  Nothing to be done about it. He forced himself to concentrate on the mission.

  Operation Lazarus. Only three people outside the team knew of its existence, and the Commander-in-Chief wasn’t one of them. The odds against it were too high. If it failed and the public found out, not only would the political fallout be fatal, it would reopen one of the country’s deepest wounds. Adding salt to that wound was the fact that they were heading into the very place where the seeds of American involvement in Vietnam had been sown in 1954.

  The French had suffered their final defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and two American pilots had been lost while lending air support. Now we were returning to the site of those first combat deaths to prevent four men captured in the final days of the conflict from becoming the last. The chance to honor the memory of those two pilots had been a strong motivating factor in putting together the highly improbable Operation Lazarus.

  No one had believed the report when it first came in. Privately, most involved still didn’t. But after checking it out, the intelligence was deemed reliable—or as reliable as such a far-fetched story could be. Reliable enough that it had to be acted upon.

  Somewhere near here, four MIAs from the Vietnam War were supposedly still being held. Their names were not yet known. The intelligence had come through channels from a Vietnamese family who claimed to know the exact whereabouts of the four captives. In exchange for divulging information that would essentially make them traitors, the family of six wanted safe passage to the Unites States.

  The deal had been made and the team put together and trained.

  Captain Zeke Sloan held up his hand and the men behind him stopped. He felt his undershirt sticking to his skin. Between gaps in the thick foliage he saw something moving. A shadow in the shape of a man. He thought he’d seen it earlier, but when they’d checked it out and found nothing, he’d dismissed it as paranoia. Now he felt sure someone was stalking them.

  He decided to risk breaking radio silence, whispering into his mike as softly as he could: “Does anyone see anything over there?” He told them where to look and what to look for. A long silent minute later the responses came.

  Negative. It was unanimous. Zeke kept staring. The shadow slowly evaporated. Continuing to stare at the same spot, he saw only two red dots at eye level. For an instant he thought they were laser sights from a weapon, but that made no sense. Why would they be aiming in that direction? Maybe it was the eyes of some jungle animal. He asked the team if they saw the spots.

  Negative.

  No more time. He motioned for them to get moving. A few minutes later he pointed through a small gap in the thick foliage. The other men came up beside him and nodded. They saw it too. A small house, little more than a hut, stood twenty yards dead ahead in a clearing.

  Communicating with hand signals, Zeke motioned for his men to begin a drill they’d rehearsed hundreds of times. He remained stationary while the others fanned forward into a U. With his Guilly Suit of leaves and debris added to his camouflage, Zeke became one of the trees as the team slowly eased along both sides of the house.

  Standing at the edge of the clearing, Zeke sensed the shadow watching him, but looked all around and saw nothing. While his men got into position he ran the key points of the mission through his head one last time:

  Get the location of the MIAs from the family. Leave the signal beacon on top of their house so the chopper could find them for extraction. While the family stayed put, Zeke’s team would find the MIAs, who were supposedly—that word had been a nagging splinter in his brain from day one—no more than two miles from the house. Liberate the MIAs, as quietly as possible. That could be tough, depending on how well-guarded they were. Almost as tough would be getting the MIAs back to the house. At best that meant a fifteen-minute sprint through dense jungle. Plus the MIAs couldn’t be counted on to have the clothing or stamina for the trip, so stretchers had been brought to carry them. Not to mention that the Landing Zone was the family’s front yard.

  He looked around the small clearing. With a perfect landing the chopper’s blades might miss the trees by inches.

  A dozen things could go wrong but Zeke slammed a door in his head to keep those thoughts locked out. Things had to be dealt with as they happened. Only one thing mattered: get the mission accomplished and everyone in the LZ at the appointed minute. Period. No second chances.

  Finally he heard Lt. Nolan’s whispered confirmation in his earphone: everyone was in position. Satisfied that there were no hostile forces waiting in ambush, Zeke whispered a single word back: “Go.”

  Like silent lightning they burst through the front and back doors of the house, unlocked as the family had assured them they would be. Cowering in the living room were the two parents and four children. In seconds the complete interior was checked. Lieutenant Reese Nolan, standing at Zeke’s right side, signaled that the objective was secure. Zeke held his friend’s stare for an extra second.

  Reese. Rock-solid and right where he was supposed to be. Always.

  Zeke’s gaze swept from man to man, each at combat ready and waiting for his orders. The room almost seemed to vibrate with intensity. The moment for which they had endured months of constant training was here. Crunch time. What got said in this room in the next few minutes would mean success or failure.

  Zeke signaled for Becker and Scimonetti to get the signal beacon onto the roof. They disappeared out the back door.

  Even though it was mandatory that each man on the team speak Vietnamese, Zeke had appointed Kevin Andrews as the spokesman, since he’d attained perfect fluency.

  Zeke stood in the center of the small room facing the nervous family. T
he wife stood half-hidden behind her husband. Zeke gauged the man at 5’6”, 140. Even at that he was the largest in the family. He nervously affected a protective posture. Zeke admired him for doing his duty in the face of all this firepower.

  The four children huddled behind their parents. The three smaller ones formed a knot behind the biggest and oldest, a pretty girl Zeke guessed to be barely out of her teens. She gave him a faint smile.

  He tried not to smile back. It struck him that she was about the same age as his sister. Behind her were a boy and two more girls, ranging in age from about fifteen to six.

  Nolan stood on Zeke’s right, Andrews on his left. The other men guarded the doors and windows. That left Michael Price to keep his eyes moving and cover everyone’s back. He stood several steps to the right of Nolan, just inside a small open window, his AK-47 at the ready. They were all using the Soviet-made assault rifle to avoid having anything traceable to the United States if hostilities broke out.

  Zeke’s gaze lingered on Michael Price. At thirty-nine he was the oldest member of the team. Zeke had specifically requested him, not only because of his reputation for fanatical dedication to drilling and staying in shape, but even more for the maturity and stability his age could bring. And yet a disturbing change had come over him in the last few seconds that had Zeke second-guessing his decision.

  Hot rage seethed on Price’s face as he glowered at the family. What had brought that on? It made no sense to play hardass here; these people were on their side. Maybe the stare was what Price needed to psyche himself up.

  Zeke nodded to Kevin Andrews. Everyone listened intently while he questioned the father. The timid man kept apologizing, bowing and chattering nervously, before Andrews could drag it out of him.

  The MIAs had been moved. The family no longer knew where they were.

  “He’s lying!”

  Price had unshouldered his AK47 and thumbed the selector switch to fully-automatic. One pull of the trigger could empty his 30-round magazine in seconds. The rifle was trained on the middle of the father’s chest.