Apocalypse Ark Read online

  Jack Dillard was a deputy assistant director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, established after 9/11 when the Company abandoned any pretense of confining its work to foreign countries. More specifically, he served with the Counterterrorism Center, where his job occasionally overlapped with work assigned to Brognola and Stony Man. He was a solid sort—six-one, about 180 pounds, dark hair neatly trimmed and going gray around the temples, with a decent sense of humor—but Brognola never forgot that they served difference agencies.

  Their handshake was perfunctory. Once small talk was disposed of, Dillard led Hal back outside, to roam along the sidewalk. “Fewer ears out here,” he said, half smiling.

  That was disingenuous, of course. Dillard could be wired for sound himself, and any number of devices had the capability of tracking them, eavesdropping as they talked, or reading their lips.

  Rather than state the obvious, Brognola asked, “So, what’s the flap, Jack?”

  “Cutting to the chase. Okay, then. We’re getting pressure from the Vatican.”

  “Falling behind on tithes and offerings?” Brognola quipped.

  Ignoring that, Dillard replied, “They’re getting nervous, Hal. Know what I mean? These suicide attacks, this business with the Ark.”

  “What do you know about the Ark?”

  “Just what I learned in Sunday school, a hundred years ago,” Dillard replied. “And the importance that a symbol has for people all around the world. I don’t have to believe it, only understand that others do. Belief makes people do some wacky things, like at Jonestown, Waco, Oklahoma City.”

  “Jonestown? You were where when that went down? In kindergarten?”

  “Please. Fourth grade, and totally beside the point.”

  “Let’s hear the point, then,” Brognola suggested.

  “Bottom line? Roman Catholics make up twenty-two percent of our national population. The number’s pushing sixty-nine million. They vote, and none of them want to be blown sky-high or shot to shit in schools and churches.”

  “Hey, who does?”

  “And if they knew about this business with the Ark,” Dillard added, “they wouldn’t want some kind of holy-moley superweapon pointed at the Vatican. That’s my point.”

  “You buy the Indiana Jones routine?”

  “Hell, no! But they could always fake it, right? Pull in a ringer—say, a dirty bomb, for instance—and pretend it was Jehovah or whoever.”

  Brognola had thought along those lines, as well, and hadn’t liked the end result.

  “I’m on it, Jack,” he finally acknowledged. “That’s all I can say.”

  Clearly dissatisfied, his contact bowed to the reality—and the deniability—of whatever covert ops Brognola controlled. “You’ll keep me posted, though?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” the big Fed said, and moved off toward the subway station that would take him back to work.

  Ios, Aegean Sea

  BISHOP ELIA MARKOPOULOS waited at the Port of Ios, on the rocky island’s northwest shore, to greet the Oceanus and its passengers. They weren’t staying long, barely a turnaround in fact, to stock up on supplies and fuel, but duty called on him to greet and honor them before they passed on to fulfill their destiny. And truth be told, if only in the silence of his heart, Markopoulos couldn’t resist being a part of the crusade, however small that part might be.

  The heroes of Custodes Foederis would be welcome at the Temple of the Immaculate Conception, and if they remembered nothing else about their time in Greece, at least they would recall the solidarity of brotherhood.

  Bishop Markopoulos had brought two members of his congregation with him as a welcome party, both armed as he was, in case any problems arose. That was unlikely on an island eleven miles long and six miles wide, with eighteen hundred inhabitants. True, Ios attracted thousands of tourists each year, who flocked to its beaches, but careful observation of the harbor during recent days had noted no suspicious types arriving since the incident at Axum.

  And indeed, who would expect to find the Ark on Ios, even for a day?

  The bishop’s cell phone vibrated against his thigh, demanding his attention. He removed it from his pocket, answered, and heard the Latin phrase: “Omnia operare ad bonum.”

  All things work together for good.

  He completed the phrase from Romans 8:28. “Ad eos quod amor Dei.”

  To them that love God.

  The bishop’s signal meant that it was safe for the Oceanus to dock and deliver its passengers, leaving their vehicles on the ship, under guard, while they loaded supplies. He would have dearly loved to see the Ark, or simply know that it had landed on his island, while still concealed from mortal eyes, but the security arrangements had been laid down in advance. Ios was no more than a way station, a pit stop of convenience. His role in the unfolding cataclysm would be minuscule at best.

  But still enough, Markopoulos felt certain, to assure him of his just reward.

  “Be ready when they dock,” he told his acolytes. “If anyone attempts to board the ship for any reason—”

  “Then we stop them,” both responded, speaking simultaneously.

  Bishop Markopoulos was satisfied. He’d drilled the warning into them relentlessly, had personally double-checked the Skorpion vz. 61 machine pistols they carried concealed under their baggy shirts, each loaded with twenty rounds of 7.65 mm Browning SR ammunition. Now his eyes swept the docks and found no one who seemed not to fit, nothing to make him think killing was imminent.

  Relaxing to the best of his ability, Markopoulos stood waiting for the ferry to arrive.

  Çorlu, Turkey

  BOLAN SLIPPED A 40-round box magazine into his AKMS rifle and cranked the action smoothly, chambering a 7.62 mm full-metal jacket round. Beside him, Halloran finished double-checking his Beretta submachine gun and turned to his pistol, pulling the SIG-Sauer’s staggered-column mag to verify a full load.

  “All set?” Bolan asked, as the pistol magazine snapped back in place.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” Halloran replied.

  The Temple of the Resurrection wouldn’t be an easy target, most particularly if they found the raiders they were hunting still on-site, and Bolan meant to be prepared. Besides his AKMS and Beretta sidearm, he had clipped four frag grenades onto his belt, under the lightweight raincoat that concealed his mobile arsenal.

  They’d parked the Fiat Stilo beside a service station that had shut down for the night, well back in shadows that would keep it hidden barring the arrival of police with spotlights, on the hunt for stolen or abandoned vehicles. Not likely, Bolan estimated, but if they stumbled into a worst-case scenario he thought they still might manage to escape on foot, pick up another car by one means or another, and elude pursuit.

  Or not.

  Luck had been running with them so far, on the first two strikes, but it could turn at any moment. Bolan, while aware of every adverse possibility, refused to worry about things that might or might not happen. Every combat soldier lived with fear, assuming he was rational, but those who let it dominate them were as good as dead.

  The blacked-out service station stood three long blocks from the Temple of the Resurrection, with a line of outlet shops in between. From that distance, nothing indicated that the church was anything beyond what it appeared to be, a meeting house for worshippers who didn’t fit with the majority of Turks, who followed Islam. On its outer wall, facing the street, a man-size wooden cross was bolted to the bricks, the temple’s name below it, in brass letters.

  Modest. Tasteful. Nothing to suggest fanaticism to the casual observer.

  Bolan looked for sentries, saw none on the street, then spotted movement at a corner of the temple’s roof. A head popped up in silhouette, peered left and right, then ducked back out of sight.

  “On top,” he cautio
ned Halloran.

  “I saw him,” the brother said.

  They had removed their backward collars and the rest of it for now, arriving after dark in what appeared to be a more or less deserted neighborhood, with no need for disguises. Bolan had considered leaving on the costume, thinking it might stall reaction time by his opponents for a crucial second, maybe more, but then decided that it made no difference. The Keepers would respond the same to clergymen with guns as they would with any other armed intruders.

  Kill or be killed, when it hit the fan.

  This time, at least, Bolan hoped they would be able to acquire some one-on-one human intelligence—what spooks addicted to their acronyms called HUMINT—that would put them closer to their quarry and the Ark.

  On their right, an alley opened, deep and dark. Bolan and Halloran turned into it, picked up their pace, their weapons coming out from under cover now, as questions crowded Bolan’s mind. Had they been spotted by the watcher on the temple’s roof? If so, how long before he missed them on the street and sounded an alarm? What happened after that? How many men and guns would they be facing in the temple?

  Never mind.

  They’d come this far, and there could be no turning back.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Temple of the Resurrection, Çorlu

  Bishop Mehmet Akdemir sipped a glass of raki, savoring the anise-flavored liquor on his tongue and welcoming its heat inside him, waiting for the alcoholic “lion’s milk,” as it was known in Turkey, to relieve his lingering anxiety. The bottle on his desk was nearly full, but Akdemir thought he might need another glass or two before he could relax.

  He’d done his part, sending the Ark and its armed escorts on their way with fresh supplies, alerting the Sedem Illustratio once they were gone. The rest came down to waiting now for news from Rome, and possible retaliation from the infidels against his temple and his flock.

  Akdemir knew that the raids in Axum and Massawa had come after any hope of locating the Ark in either place was gone. That told him the attacks were meant as punishment, or as a means to gain intelligence about the object’s whereabouts, to intercept it and prevent its use against the Scarlet Whore of Babylon. If Bishop Sultan had been induced to speak, perhaps through torture, it was possible the enemy would come for Akdemir and his disciples next.

  No time to waste, then.

  Akdemir had taken special interest in the plan hatched by Janus Marcellus and Mania Justina to vanquish their age-old enemy. His ancestors, the Seljuq Turks, had been primary targets of the great Crusades after they cut off Christian access to Jerusalem by seizing Anatolia. His homeland had been a blood-drenched battleground for some two centuries, and Akdemir had been raised to hate the popes who’d claimed divine rights to the world at large. His lifelong study of those tragic years included the collection of a thousand books or more on the Crusades, together with a host of maps depicting troop movements and battle sites.

  And now, when he was helping to seek retribution for a great historical injustice, it was only natural that Akdemir would write a treatise of his own. The document would be complete with maps, of course, depicting how the Ark was transported from Ethiopia to Rome by a select cadre of heroes and delivered to the very doorstep of their enemies. And if he did say so himself, the hand-drawn illustrations weren’t half-bad. He had a flair for illustration that would certainly impress a host of readers in the years to come, once the corruption of their adversaries had been purged by holy fire.

  But if it fell into the wrong hands while the Ark was still in transit...

  As he poured a second glass of raki, barely conscious of draining the first, the bishop experienced a new pang of concern. Destroying all his hard work was unthinkable, but he could hide it, certainly, where no intruder could discover it. There was a vault concealed within the temple’s basement, nothing grand, but stout enough to weather fire and flood with no loss to the articles inside. A simple stroll downstairs, and Akdemir could hide his work from prying eyes until such time as it was safe and he could write the final chapters in his epic saga of global salvation.

  But first...another glass of raki.

  It was curious, he thought, how each mouthful tasted a little better than the last. The ninety-proof liquor no longer burned going down. It simply made him feel mellow. A few more sips, a few more moments, and he would carry the crate filled with his literary and artistic labors to the vault. No one else in the temple even had to know. It would be Akdemir’s little secret.

  He was smiling, satisfied with his decision, when the first shots echoed from outside.

  * * *

  BOLAN WAS STILL expecting shouts of warning as he cleared the alley, turning left to reach the Temple of the Resurrection’s small back door. In fact, the lookout on the roof had still done nothing, had to have missed the enemies approaching, but another stood before Bolan and Halloran, blocking their way.

  Or, rather, he was slouched in front of them, half dozing on his feet, slumped back against the stucco wall. Whether imbalance or a premonition of impending danger woke him, they would never know. Bolan squeezed off a silenced round from his Beretta, drilled the sentry’s left eye socket with a Parabellum bullet, and dropped him like a sack of laundry to the pavement.

  Where the automatic weapon carried by the dead man suddenly discharged a 3- or 4-round burst.

  The bullets posed no threat to Halloran or Bolan, angled backward, ripping through the lookout’s lifeless legs and feet before they struck the back door of the church, but the reports were loud enough to wake the dead.

  Well, almost.

  Bolan heard a muffled curse from Halloran, but saved his own breath for a rush to kick the door in, smashing through it with minimal resistance from the simple keyed lock in its knob. The dead bolt, he supposed, was left open to let the sentry come and go, convenience taking precedence over security. Across the threshold, with Halloran behind him, Bolan scanned for targets and saw no one, but heard voices drawing closer, barking inquiries and orders that he couldn’t understand.

  No matter. Their intent was obvious, and so was his response.

  He met the first three shooters with his AKMS set on full-auto, stroking short bursts from the piece with a precision touch. The first one around the corner took his in the chest and vaulted backward, slamming into number two, the bullets ripping through him, taking both men down. The third tried to retreat, but wasn’t quick enough, half turning to become a profile target, framed by light behind him, dropping in a haze of crimson mist as Bolan’s next rounds found him.

  More voices, footsteps pounding toward them over concrete floors, and Bolan went to meet them, Halloran staying close. Stepping around and over corpses, Bolan reached the corner, risked a glance around it, then ducked back before a spray of automatic fire blazed down the corridor.

  “Four more,” he cautioned Halloran, already reaching underneath his raincoat for a frag grenade. He palmed the RGD-5, pulled its pin and lobbed the bomb in a sidehand toss around the corner, more shots crackling at him as his arm was visible to his assailants for a fraction of a second.

  With that racket, Bolan couldn’t hear the RGD-5 bouncing over concrete, but the Keepers had to have seen it coming. They were shouting suddenly, still firing as they scrambled to get out of range, but how far can a person scramble in three seconds and change, on slippery concrete?

  Not far enough.

  The warning shouts turned into screams, then were eclipsed by thunder as the fragmentation grenade exploded in the narrow corridor. Bolan heard shrapnel plinking into walls and ceiling tiles, and wet slapping sounds where razor-edged fragments of sheet steel met flesh. Easing around the corner, he found his four opponents down, two of them lying sprawled and silent, while the writhing pair drew bloody abstract patterns on the floor.

  Bolan gave each of them a mercy round at point-blank range
, heard Brother Halloran mouthing what might have been a prayer, and moved on past the dead in search of living prey. None of the young men they had met so far matched the description he’d been given of the temple’s master, Bishop Mehmet Akdemir. The man he hoped to find and take alive, this time, in hope of bringing a conclusion to their quest ASAP.

  But first, he thought, there’d be more guns to face.

  More blood to spill.

  * * *

  BROTHER JOSEPH HALLORAN was torn by mixed emotions as he followed Matthew Cooper along the hallway strewed with bodies, sprayed and smeared with blood as if a psychopathic artist had been called to decorate the place. He felt revulsion at one level, witnessing—and joining in—the desecration of a church, misguided and fanatical as its parishioners might be. But on the other hand, Halloran also felt exhilaration in the heat of combat, something he’d experienced before and felt compelled to mention in confession.

  His Beretta M12S weighed seven pounds without its 32-round magazine, but it felt featherlight to Halloran just now, as if he’d brought along a plastic replica by accident. Adrenaline was singing through his veins, making him almost giddy, while the smell of burned gunpowder filled his nostrils, mingling with the sharp metallic tang of blood.

  In front of him, Cooper raised a warning hand, but Halloran had heard the enemy approaching, voices lowered to a whisper now, after their shouting friends had come to bloody grief. From the sounds, they were collected in a room ahead and to his left, the door ajar, light spilling forth. Some kind of meeting hall, perhaps, where they had gathered for their prayers or social discourse, then had found themselves besieged.

  Halloran edged to one side of the tall American, leveled his SMG and moved ahead with cautious steps to meet the next wave of defenders. When they spilled from hiding, he was ready, dropping to a crouch beside Matt Cooper and firing short bursts to conserve his ammunition, marking targets as they came in turn, putting them down.