God's Lions - House of Acerbi (34 page)

“That river winds through some pretty rugged country ... and then there are those gangs of armed thugs out there roaming the countryside right now.”

“I know. I had planned on scouting the area from the air this morning, but that plan just went up in flames. Damn, we really needed that helicopter.”

Lev’s radio crackled to life. “Professor, are you there?”

“Yes.”

“The sensors along our northeast border are going crazy. So are the ones on our eastern perimeter. We can see armed men just across the river, and ... “

“And what?”

“And there are three large helicopters inbound from the north.”

“How long until they’re here?”

“About five minutes, sir ... if we’re lucky.”

From his chateau, Rene Acerbi was talking on the radio to the commander of a flight of three Blackhawk helicopters as they swooped in low over the river. Breaking formation, two of the Blackhawks suddenly peeled off and circled around so that they could attack the castle from the opposite direction.

On the ground, gunfire aimed at the commander’s helicopter erupted from the trees bordering the vineyards. The door gunner in the Blackhawk immediately returned fire with an M-134 mini-gun, a fearsome weapon with a cyclic rate of fire of 50 rounds per second. In a scorching hail of bullets, the guns on the ground were quickly silenced as the chopper flew by overhead.

Swinging around from the south, the other two choppers took aim at the castle and let loose with a fusillade of rockets from their side pods. In rapid succession, the rockets impacted at regular intervals along the ancient walls of the castle, and when the smoke had cleared, a medieval piece of history was nothing more than a scorched pile of unrecognizable rubble at the top of the hill.

Inside the commander’s chopper, the pilot frowned as they came to a hover above the smoking remains of the little blue chopper at the base of the hill.

“Looks like something happened down in the compound before we got here, sir.”

The commander frowned. “What did you say?”

“The compound seems to have taken a hit before we arrived.”

“A hit? Are our men encountering much resistance on the perimeter?”

“None ... they’ve already made it across the river and are advancing through the vineyard.”

“What about the gunfire we received from the tree line?”

“It came from one of their radar-guided ground-to-air weapons. Apparently, it was unmanned and was set to fire automatically.”

Back at the chateau, Acerbi keyed the microphone and called the leader of his forces on the ground. “What’s the body count down there, captain?”

“There are no bodies, sir.”

Acerbi practically screamed into the microphone. “What do you mean
no bodies
?”

Everyone listening over the radio could hear the tremble in the man’s voice when he answered. “I mean there’s no one here, sir. The site is completely deserted!”

 * * 

Everyone from the compound was running. Ahead of them, the floor of the tunnel angled down and then up again as it wound through the earth beneath the countryside. There were almost sixty people making their way through the underground labyrinth, including half a dozen children. Behind them, they could feel the ground shake from time to time with explosions, making them run even faster as they looked back over their shoulders.

“How far do we have to go, Ephraim?” Leo huffed.

“These tunnels go on for miles, Cardinal. They were dug back in the 13
^th
century by villagers trying to escape from all the marauding armies that were sweeping across this part of France. It was the time of all the religious massacres.”

Now, as they ran, it was beginning to look like history was repeating itself. Twenty minutes earlier, when they had learned that armed men were approaching the compound from across the river to the north, Lev had given the order for everyone to flee. With three inbound helicopter gunships supporting a large, well-coordinated ground assault force, it didn’t take a military genius to figure out that the attackers would overwhelm the castle’s defenses within minutes.

When Lev had originally purchased the property, Ephraim had showed him the medieval tunnel system. Right away, they both saw that the tunnels would provide a perfect escape route if the compound was ever attacked.
The Israelis always had a backup plan
.

In keeping with their pre-planned exit strategy, everyone, including those stationed around the perimeter, had escaped down into the tunnel system before making their way to a rendezvous point under the castle. Once they had all gathered together, Moshe performed a quick head-count as Ephraim began leading the entire assemblage into the depths of the labyrinth. After walking for forty-five minutes, they entered a large, cavern-like space that contained a shallow pool of clear, aquamarine water.

“We need to stop for a minute,” Ariella said. “The children need to rest.”

Lev clinched an unlit cigar in his teeth and surveyed the space. “Ok, but only for a couple of minutes. If the same men who just attacked the castle have discovered the tunnels, they could already be down here searching for us.”

“It won’t be easy for them,” Ephraim said. “The tunnels under the castle fan out in all directions. They’ll have to know which way we went if they want to come after us.”

“What about the Carmela?” Leo asked.

“I radioed Alex about our situation before we left the castle. He agrees that we should follow the Aude River to the coast. They’ll be waiting for us offshore in the speedboats.”

“How are we going to travel down the river with all of these people, especially the children?”

“There’s a river barge tied up downriver that belongs to a friend of ours,” Ephraim said. “We just have to make it to that barge and get everyone onboard without being seen. From there, we should be able to make it all the way to the Mediterranean.”

Carrying a heavy duffle bag full of weapons, John walked over and dropped the bag on the ground next to Leo. Breathing in the musty smell of the tunnels, he looked over his head at the roof of the cavern. “Have you two noticed that, whenever we’re all together, we end up underground somewhere?”

They both stared back at him for a second before the two of them burst out laughing.

Leo slapped him on the back. “I don’t know how you do it, John. You always make me laugh at the most inappropriate times.”

Chuckling to himself, Lev reached to light his cigar before he caught himself. The smell of cigar smoke would be a dead giveaway.
No sense in giving their pursuers a cigar-scented trail to follow
. “Let’s keep moving. There’s a side tunnel up ahead that exits under the ruins of an old abandoned castle.”

Moving on through the twisting tunnels, they reached a steep stairway carved into soft white stone. Looking up, they saw a faint light and began to climb until they reached several massive stone blocks that had tumbled down into the tunnel, leaving only a tiny crawl space between them and the daylight beyond. One by one, they all squeezed through, ending up outside among the crumbling ruins of a long-forgotten castle.

A sudden gust temporarily blinded Leo, and as he turned to shield his eyes, he spotted Lev standing behind a large block of stone, trying to light his cigar.

“Where are we?” Leo shouted against the wind.

“You’re standing in the ruins of a 12
^th
century Cathar fortification.” Lev pointed across the valley to a column of smoke rising into the sky. “That’s what’s left of our castle.”

Against a clear blue sky, Leo could see the dense black smoke rising from a hilltop in the distance. Instinctively, he scanned the vicinity for helicopters and listened for the distinctive staccato-like chop of whirling rotor blades. It looked like the choppers were gone ... at least for now.

Walking to the edge of a cliff, Leo could see that the weathered ruin of this medieval castle lay next to a sheer rock wall overlooking the river. It was obvious that its builders had taken advantage of its natural defensive position, for it would have been suicide to mount an assault up a sheer cliff, even though, unbeknownst to Leo, the details of history had spared this particular castle from ever being attacked.

Seven hundred years ago, the castle’s residents had abandoned it in place and fled for their lives in advance of a marauding army that had swept across the land putting everyone to the sword, even women and children. Rather than war, it had been stone masons who had reduced the castle to rubble when they had quarried its stone over the years for the construction of houses in a nearby village.

Leo felt a chill run down his spine when he surveyed the large cracked stone and looked out over the golden fields below. Ever since he had first arrived in this area of France, a vague feeling of uneasiness had been tugging at him. There was something about this place that had troubled him, something that he had been unable to put his finger on ... until now.

It was at that moment, on a cliff with the wind in his face, that Leo was suddenly struck with the realization of where he was standing. It was here, in this exact part of France, that the Catholic Church had begun its depraved descent into one of the darkest chapters in its long history, for this had once been the land of the Cathars.

Leo had found their story fascinating. He had actually offered a semester-long course on the Cathar religion to some of his graduate students when he was teaching at Boston College, but hardly anyone signed up, so the course was dropped.

The Cathars of the Languedoc, as they were called, were a religious group that suddenly appeared in the Languedoc region of southern France in the 11
^th
century. Their origin remains something of a mystery. It was as if they had blown in on the wind, much like the wind that now whipped over the men, women, and children who were huddled together behind Leo. Seven hundred years ago, Cathar families had also huddled together on this very hilltop, preparing to flee from a murderous army bent on their destruction.

Long before the days of the Protestant Reformation that eventually changed the face of religion in the Christian world forever, the Cathars had been a separate religion from Catholicism. The word Cathar came from the Greek
Katharoi
, meaning “pure ones”. Unlike other medieval movements, they had formed their own system of religious beliefs centered on kindness to others, the rejection of material wealth, and the promise of universal redemption inspired by Christ and his disciples.

They regarded men and women as equals, and they opposed all forms of killing, both human and animal. Because of this, they refused to eat meat or any other animal products, including eggs. Many of their ideas would seem startling and rather new-age, even to modern man, but their Christ-like theology of forgiving those who persecuted them was even more astonishing in the 11
^th
century, a cruel period of history when man still believed the sun revolved around the earth.

Theirs was a dualist theology, for the Cathars preached that there was a complete incompatibility between love and power. Another radical departure from traditional Christianity was their rejection of the established belief in a one all-encompassing god. Instead, they believed in two equal gods of comparable power and status—one benevolent and one evil. In other words, they believed in a good god and a bad god. Basically, it was a different way of looking at the two separate entities of God and Satan, although some would argue that point.

They alleged that the physical world was evil and created by the Satan-like god they called
Rex Mundi
. He was known as “
the king of the world
” who ruled over all that was physical, chaotic, and powerful. The other god, the one whom the Cathars worshipped, was said to be a spirit of light that was completely untainted by all things physical. He was the god of love and peace. If modern hippies would have chosen a religion, it would have been the religion of the Cathars.

The Cathars believed that mankind was infused with a spark of divine light. This light, or spirit, had become captive in the physical body in a world ruled by Satan, thus the spirit of humanity was trapped in a sinful world created by an evil god and ruled by his corrupt minions.

At its doctrinal core, their beliefs centered on the New Testament, especially the Gospel of John. Because they embraced the New Testament as their most sacred text, they rejected the traditional view of the Old Testament, proclaiming that the God of the Old Testament was really the devil. Those who followed this line of thinking believed Satan had created the world as a sort of prison for mankind, and that he used the Old Testament to demand fearful obedience from
his children
. To the Cathars, this made perfect sense. It explained the human condition of suffering and misery brought on by violence, disease, hunger and poverty—all the things that had plagued humanity since the beginning of time, and Satan was behind it all in the form of an evil god that ruled over the earth and all things material.

The true god of the Cathars was a higher god—a god of love—a pure spirit that embraced his human followers. They believed that Jesus Christ was his messenger and referred to themselves as Christians, but the Catholic Church called them something else. To the medieval Catholic Church, the Cathars were heretics.

At the time, the region of southern France known as the Languedoc was not really considered a part of France. The culture of the area was still rooted in the feudal system, but the enlightened Cathars refused to swear an oath to any feudal lord. By the early 13
^th
century, the tolerant and liberal beliefs of the Cathars had become the dominate religion in the area, much to the annoyance of the Catholic Church, who was being held up to public ridicule when their bejeweled abbots and priests, dressed in their best finery, preached poverty and demanded tithes to be paid to them in the name of the Church. The Cathars referred to the Catholic Church as the
Church of the Wolves
, while the Catholics countered with accusations that the Cathars belonged to the
Synagogue of Satan
.