The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (30 page)

“One of what?”

“The Knights of St. John.”

Kimberlain’s eyes widened at that. He was familiar with the Knights of the Order of St. John, just as he was familiar with all great warrior creeds throughout history. Left in 1565 to defend Malta’s Fort St. Elmo with 120 men against 10,000 marauding Turks, they held the invaders off—incredibly—for thirty-one days. Many referred to that as the birth of guerrilla warfare, because the knights employed strategies such as mining the harbor with chain mail and swimming out beyond the Turks’ lines to toss makeshift bombs onto their decks. The drawn-out seige marked a major failure in the attempt of Sultan Suleiman I to destroy Christianity with a spearhead group of Ottoman Islamics he had joined forces with and who had gained legendary fame during the Crusades—the Assassins, often referred to as the Hashi, shortened from “Hashishi” for their purported use of the drug hashish prior to entering battle.

The Knights of Malta, as they were also called, had handed the Hashi their worst defeat ever but been wiped out themselves in the process, only to reappear in later years as a mundane religious order with all warrior ties lost. At least, that had been the tale.

“A pair of knights survived,” Danielle continued by way of explanation, “and vowed to secretly rebuild the order in its original form, with only one task in mind: to destroy the Hashi forever. Their fervor waned somewhat with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, as the Hashi retreated into the shadows. But the vow lived on to be passed from generation to generation, though the knights were more watchdogs than warriors then, until the last twenty years have returned the Hashi to prominence.”

“Terrorism,” Kimberlain said.

“Exactly. They were available for hire to anyone who wanted them and had the funds to pay. They broadened out and set up chapters of their perverse society in every major and several minor countries. They formed a subculture of sorts, thriving beneath the surface without the world knowing. They had no politics, but they provided an inexhaustible supply of manpower to groups such as the IRA, the PLO, Black September, the Red Brigades. They’ve become professional terrorists, not even worthy of being called assassins anymore.”

Kimberlain nodded, recalling similar words he had spoken to Zeus while he was still with The Caretakers. “I knew they were out there, but I never got close enough, never found hard proof. All I had was innuendo. No one believed I could have been right.”

“Which has served as their greatest ally for a thousand years. People won’t believe in them, so for all intents and purposes they don’t exist. But something changed. We uncovered their stronghold in Nice because suddenly they had begun to surface, leaving a trail where none had ever been left before.”

“Think about it,” Kimberlain said. “Benbasset sought them out to be of service to him, but I’m betting they agreed to do so only for a unique fee. Imagine a group like the Hashi emerging
prepared
into the ruins of the world Benbasset’s plot leaves behind. That’s what the surfacing you referred to must be about. They have to surface in order to be ready when the time comes. It’s like being at the point of Suleiman’s charge again, except this time it’s not just Christianity they’re trying to overrun, it’s the whole world.”

“You’re giving them credit for principles they no longer possess.”

“Why wouldn’t they, or at least enough of them? If enough of the Knights of Malta have managed to stay true to their cause for over four hundred years, why not a similar number of Hashi? The world in the wake of whatever Benbasset’s got in store for it would be a world made for them.”

“I’ll accept that, but it still doesn’t explain Benbasset. If he plans on destroying the world anyway, why bother with a separate plot aimed at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade?”

“For the same reason he bothered killing a number of industrialists with links to the military. I’ve had some experience with this type of thinking before. The ends were different, but the thought processes were much the same. Basically Benbasset isn’t a paranoid or a psychotic; he’s an obsessive, and an obsessive nature requires escalation. All this must have started with the notion of the murders. But even as he planned and began to initiate them, they were no longer enough. So he turned his attention to the event in which his family was killed, Macy’s parade, not as replacement so much as extension. From there his field of focus widened to the whole of civilization he had lost faith in. Why not punish the whole of it? The extension was logical in terms of its progression, and Benbasset won’t pull back, even if he knows we’re on to all phases of his plan, which may give us our only chance to stop him.”

“And yet he’s really not much different from you or me, is he?” Danielle said. “Both of us are here now because we’re trying to make up for the way we led our lives in the past. In the context of the time, they weren’t mistakes, but the context is meaningless. We’ve all formed our own versions of paybacks, not trying to right the wrongs but at least pursuing a balance.”

“And that’s where we all go wrong, because the scales keep shifting.” He remembered something Peet had told him. “The mistake we too often make is to try to escape from our prisons instead of making do with them. Everybody is searching for something, and when they find it, they search for something else. I used to drive myself crazy trying to put a number on how many paybacks it would take before I had fulfilled my purpose. I’d gone from being the prisoner of one sort of morality to being the prisoner of another. My actions have been basically the same; only the justifications have changed. And even though I realize all that, I can’t lie here and tell you I have any regrets, because at least I can sleep straight through the night now without waking up in a sweat like a kid out of a nightmare. But it was worse for me, because I could never remember the last thing that had been in my mind. It was buried so deep, I kept losing it.”

“Charon was never this philosophical when he ferried people across the River Styx.”

“He was seldom as busy as I’ve been lately.”

The Mind had been torn. The problem, it realized, lay indeed with the first life. But not just its own. The instant of blinding heat had birthed the second life and the truths of a new level of consciousness. Yet the pain had remained, so more than another instant of blinding heat must be required to accomplish what it had to in order to find the peace it sought.

So simple! So obvious!

Civilization’s first life had failed and desperately required a second one for the whole of it. The Mind looked to fate, and fate looked back. Just as clear as the necessary ends were the means, drawn from the shadows of the Mind’s memories from the first life. How fitting that such a marvel of the first life should hold the means for giving birth to civilization’s second. Indeed, in the Mind’s perspective this was a birth more than a death, or birth
out of
death.

At last the relentless, raging pain of its thoughts were soothed. The faces no longer haunted the dreamlike state it called sleep. They had shown it the way, and the Mind understood that fate was not only looking but smiling.

Finally the Mind rested.

The Seventh Trumpet
The Knights of St. John

Monday, November 23; 8:00
A.M.

Chapter 27

THE FLIGHT BY SMALL
private jet from London to Luqa Airport outside Malta’s capital of Valletta took three hours, proving as uneventful as their post-dawn trek to Gatwick had been. Kimberlain had by then resigned himself to not learning the final details of Benbasset’s plan—the connection between the hijacked sub and Spiderweb—until they reached their final destination,

The explanation came a half hour later, after a drive through the comfortably cool Maltese air. A car had been left for Danielle at a prearranged spot at the airport. She pulled it into a space just beyond the courtyard of St. John’s Cathedral and led Kimberlain toward the steps fronting the building. The cathedral had been built in 1577 as a testament to the great siege of the Knights of St. John and to this day retained all of its simple yet majestic elegance. A pair of bell towers, one adorned with a huge clock, rose over the facade on either side. The entrance was between a pair of bronze cannons Kimberlain wouldn’t mind restoring to add to his armaments collection. The bizarre mixture of the military and the religious, he supposed, was part and parcel of the Maltese culture.

Danielle led the way up the marble steps, beneath a portico supporting a balcony, and into the cathedral itself. Its depth and beauty struck the Ferryman instantly. The cathedral’s high, narrow vaults towered over the nave’s floor, which was covered entirely with multicolored marble atop the tombs of the Knights of St. John, their individual, distinctive coats of arms creating the effect of a massive stone carpet. The ceiling was rounded and equally glorious, separate ribbed sections extending like a tunnel toward the choir. The nave was virtually deserted, but Kimberlain watched Danielle eye the few apparent tourists warily.

Running down both sides of the nave were carved archways leading into the cathedral’s separate chapels. The third bay led to a flanking passage connecting with the building’s south wing and the Oratory of St. John. The oratory wasn’t as long as the nave, but it was just as wide, with pews on both sides and an aisle running down the middle toward the altar. Several people were seated, some in positions of prayer. Danielle walked straight down the aisle until she came to a monk in brown robes kneeling half out of the pew and half in it. She signaled the Ferryman into the row behind him, and seconds later the monk crossed himself and slid backward until he was occupying the aisle seat next to Kimberlain, with Danielle on the other side.

“Hello, Ferryman,” he said softly. “Know me as Brother Valette.”

The monk had taken the name of Jean de la Valette, who had led the original Knights of Malta in battle back in 1565, and Kimberlain wondered if he might be an actual descendant.

“We must be quick about this,” the monk said. “There is little time, and as Danielle has no doubt explained, our order has been compromised. Trust no longer exists. It is, must be, just the three of us.”

“You’re the leader of the Knights,” Kimberlain concluded.

“And you are a warrior of legend, Ferryman.”

A group of choirboys, dressed in white robes, made their way down the center aisle. Brother Valette was silent as they passed on their way to the choir stalls near the altar, and Kimberlain used the opportunity to study him where his monk’s cowl allowed inspection. His was an old face, but tanned and vital, the eyes a piercing green. It was a face that showed none of the desperation present in his words.

“I assume Danielle has informed you of the scope of what we are up against,” Brother Valette resumed.

“Pieces. Fragments.”

“All she was made privy to, I’m afraid. She passed on the information. The conclusions were left to us.”

“Concerning the connection between a stolen nuclear submarine and a secret network of oil installations.”

“Such fragments are joining to form a cataclysm such as no man has ever seen. Are you familiar with the Book of Revelation, Ferryman? The Apocalypse?”

“A little.”

“Before each of the seven great woes, a trumpet blast was heard. The eighth is about to sound now.” He shifted to face Kimberlain more directly. “Something called Outpost 10 forms the heart of Spiderweb eight hundred miles from McMurdo Base beyond the Transantarctic Mountains. Pipelines five to ten feet in diameter lead in and out of the complex, worming and weaving their way across much of Antarctica.”

“Crisscrossing the continent like veins,” Kimberlain elaborated.

In one of the choir stalls by the altar, beneath a huge red tapestry combining an ornate crucifix with the Knights of Malta coat of arms suspended from a chain, the boys’ choir had begun warming up their voices.

“But the continent is fragile,” Brother Valette was saying. “The many levels of ice, some as thick as three miles, account for its vast weight and mass. Only Dr. Mendelson’s water jet system made it possible to lay the Spiderweb pipeline without disturbing the delicate environmental balance, but it also created a deadly vulnerability.”

“To be exploited through the submarine. But how?”

“I’m not sure, but it must be the missiles.”

“Procedure on board any Trident requires four men to use their codes before firing can take place. I can’t envision how the hijackers’ plan could assure that.”

“You miss my point. If they simply wanted to fire the missiles they could have done so from the sea, perhaps already. The key must lie with Outpost 10 itself. Utilize its status as the central control station to somehow destroy the pipeline—and the continent along with it. Imagine Antarctica fracturing along the lines of Spiderweb the way porcelain breaks on ancient fracture lines when dropped. The Eighth Trumpet, Ferryman, at the very least.”

On the choir platform, the boys were fishing through their robes for their music sheets.

“I know a man who can get the entire 82nd Airborne to Outpost 10 overnight,” Kimberlain said, thinking of Zeus. “We’ve got three days, assuming Benbasset sticks to his progression.”

The man dressed as a monk looked almost relieved. “You can see now why it was crucial for us to make contact with you. The more we uncovered, the more it became obvious that we lacked the resources to stop the enemy, because suddenly that enemy seemed to wield limitless power. Obviously there was something we were missing—the unholy alliance you describe between Benbasset and the faceless Hashi leader we know only as Quintanna. The direction may have come from Benbasset, but the men behind the killings and those on board the submarine are unquestionably Quintanna’s. Each of them has goals which require the resources of the other to be achieved. Yes, an alliance forged in hell and one we—”

Brother Valette’s words were cut short as the first burst of automatic fire sliced across their pew, followed by a half dozen more. His body jumped horribly, was caught by another series of bullets, then crumbled as the wood around him splintered into the air.