The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE (2 page)

It is a short walk from the 135
^th
Street Station to his one bedroom apartment on the top floor of a four story, pre-war brownstone. Once safely inside, Joe retrieves his spare laptop from under his bed. He built it himself a few years ago; it will be safe to use, untraceable. Though his body aches for sleep, he dares not lie down. Instead, he leaves his bedroom and places the computer on his small, kitchen table. The bottle of scotch and half-carton of Marley’s cigarettes are still on the shelf beneath the cupboards, right where he left them six months ago. He pulls the cork cap off the bottle and takes a large swallow of the golden liquid. He draws immediate comfort from the spreading warmth of the scotch. Joe places his gun on the table and sits before the computer. He splits the laptop open and pulls a short antenna from its back. It immediately begins drawing energy into the drained battery from the apartment’s ambient electromagnetic field. Joe thumbs the power button. It reads his finger print and flashes green. He lights up a cigarette while he waits for the computer to boot up. When it is running, Joe plucks the stylus from its recessed sheath and begins writing on the kitchen table. The pen is inkless. Through it, the computer converts his handwriting into text on the top screen.

[I have little doubt that I will be remembered among such notables as Judas, Brutus and our own John Wilkes Booth. In a matter of days or maybe hours, assassins will find and kill me. Of this, I am certain. I am pressed therefore to tell you my story, which might just be your story as well…]

Joe blows a jet of smoke at the screen as he wonders where to start. The beginning eludes him but not because memory fails him. Quite the contrary, it inundates him with a series of incidents, each of which could be called a beginning. These points of history reach back years and even decades. In truth, the chain of events that have led Joe Corelli to this particular moment, sitting alone in the dark of his kitchen with a computer and a cocked Glock-33, began before he was even born. The yoke of history suddenly weighs heavier on him
than the sleep deprivation. He takes another generous swig of the scotch. He follows it with a deep drag off the Marley. The combined effects of the alcohol and the cigarette’s THC begin to counter the adrenaline in his system. He turns the bottle in his hand until the label faces him. It is the last bottle from a case of twenty-one year old MacAllans’ single malt. It was given to him by the man he betrayed a few days ago. It was a gift from the man who turned the world on its head, the very man the Knights Templar would come to avenge.

The laptop’s prompt is blinking in time with the ticks and tocks of the kitchen clock. Joe ignores their synchronized urgency and smokes his Marley slowly and deliberately down to the filter. When he snuffs out the cigarette, his hands have stopped shaking. He picks up the stylus and continues to write.

[Fifteen years ago, I was just another analyst working for the NSA. I was hired right out of college in 2016. Eight years after having won the White House on the promise to dismantle the ‘spy machine’ their predecessor used to ‘ride rough shod over American civil liberties’, Democrats were forced, not only to re-enact the programs, but also to expand their powers beyond the reach that George W. Bush permitted. They didn’t have a choice. The steady rise of terrorist attacks on our soil was proof enough that Jihadist cells were, in fact, living among us. President O’Neill kept the Democrats in power by reversing his party’s position on surveillance programs. He flooded the intelligence community with funds and hired more analysts. I was just one of the hundreds whose job it was to divine who the terrorists were and what their next targets might be. The intelligence chiefs were convinced that while the sleeper cell’s wake-up calls came from abroad, the plotting was being done within our borders. The administration was desperate to identify these enemy generals living behind our lines. It hoped that destroying the ‘head cells’ would be enough to win, what the President had dubbed, the ‘War for Law and Order’.

Toward that end, we were given a blank check and a free hand. We not only monitored ‘calls of interest’ coming into the country but as many within our borders as gave us cause. We listened in on calls, prowled invisibly through chat rooms and blogs and scoured through the billions of bytes that deluged our machines daily. We were Big Brother. We made no bones about it. If we were not everywhere watching everyone, it was not for lack of trying. We were looking for connections and patterns, searching feverishly
for anything remotely resembling a warning sign that could spare us the next deadly attack. We looked for terrorists everywhere, even in our own military. It was my team that, after months of charting and analyzing military communications, noticed the unauthorized deployments of supplies and munitions. Assets of every kind were being shuffled around in an elaborate shell game and disappearing from inventories. We believed we had stumbled across the largest, most ambitious, illegal arms trading operation in history.

We were half right.

It was the only sign we would have of the cabal that was about to overthrow the government of the United States of America.

We at the NSA were alarmed, to say the least. The President, who resented his lack of popularity among the troops, was furious. He resisted, however, the suggestion of his VP to go public with the investigation immediately. O’Neill wanted to know exactly who the ‘SOB’s were rather than indict the whole military with mere suspicion. Ever the politician, I can only guess that he didn’t want to be portrayed as openly antagonistic to the armed forces, not after so recently alienating much of them with a new round of budget cuts that reduced their funding in order to pay for his ‘Great Civilization Initiatives.’

Whatever his reasons, it was his undoing. His administration collapsed and his Presidency ended with a single, sniper’s bullet…]

1

The Church Suffering

“Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for by every generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.”

—Ronald Reagan

Rome 2019, Christmas Eve

24:00:01

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

The Pope prays for peace.

He is an old man in a new century.

Not a single day of the century’s first two decades has known anything of that most benevolent of God’s manifold blessings, peace. Not a single one of its days has escaped the bloodletting scourge of war. The twenty-first century is on track to outdo the twentieth in barbarism. And again, Christendom seems bound to bear the brunt of it. Fifty million Christians, two-thirds of all the martyrs in Christianity’s two thousand years were slain in the last century.
The twenty-first is on pace to double that number. His last two predecessors are counted among its first martyrs. Benedict XVI was killed in 2013 with hundreds of others when a fully fueled cargo jet was flown into Corcovado, making a torch of the wooded mountaintop and toppling its iconic, twenty-three hundred foot statue of Christ, our Lord. His successor, Pius XIII was shot by a sniper last Easter while addressing the crowds from the Papal balcony.

Outside the basilica, Saint Peter’s Plaza is empty. The faithful are kept out of the Holy City by troops, armored vehicles and sandbagged machine gun nests. Instead, the worshippers ring the Vatican in a halo of candle light, a million strong by the most conservative of estimates. They’ve gathered from all over the world, coming as close to their spiritual father as the new communist government of Italy will allow. The new regime wants to abrogate the Lateran Treaty, take back the Papal estate and, as its new Minister of Culture declared to the world, ‘liberate the treasures hoarded by the church.’ The Bishop of Rome’s tiny city-state has been under siege since October. No one has been allowed in or out. They have appealed to the World Court for help, but what few allies they had in the United Nations deserted them when the Holy See denounced their latest initiative for population control. Europe will not help them. They turned their back on the Church a long time ago. America, following Europe’s lead, has also turned a cold, secularist shoulder to their entreaty. Africa and the East are powerless to aid them and South America is too embroiled in the jockeying for power between juntas and strongmen to concern itself over affairs beyond their continent.

Inside the basilica, the peace the Vicar of Christ prays for descends upon him as he crosses into the sanctuary and the chorus fills the hallowed hollow of Saint Peter’s with the Introit, the processional song that begins the Mass. The music of the
Dominus dixit
is solemn and beautiful. It swells the heart to near breaking. The chanting voices are as divine as anything this side of Heaven can approximate.

“The Lord has said to me, Thou art My Son, this day I have begotten Thee…”

His Lord and God, waiting for the Bishop of Rome in the tabernacle draws the Pope onward and up the steps. The Holy Father has been making his way to Him all his life. He ascends to the altar of God, one carefully placed step after another, yearning to yet again perform his holy office with all the devotion that he has poured into every Mass for over sixty years. He bows atop the highest
step and places the veiled and palled chalice on the altar. So close to the tabernacle, his heart quickens with the familiar ache to draw near to the Lord his God, to unite with Him once again in the Eucharist.

The Vicar of Christ, his aging, failing flesh bent by the gravity of time, bends lower still, in abject humility before the eternal promise of God’s Mercy, and kisses the altar in thanksgiving.

‘Why do the nations rage and the people utter folly?’
The Introit continues through the second Psalm the Missal assigns for Christmas Mass.

The Pope climbs back down the altar steps. The small exertion ignites arthritic fires in his knees and hips. He offers up the pain to his God. There are servers, young and strong priests, on either side of him ready to prop him up should his frail and faltering, ninety-two year old body stumble. The Community of Saints portrayed in the stained glass windows and statuary, they are also with him, bolstering his spirit. He can hear their voices threaded throughout the processional song of the Introit:

“The kings of the earth rise up, and the princes conspire against the Lord and His Anointed. ‘Let us break their fetters and cast their bonds from us!’”

“He who is enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord derides them.”

“Filius meus es tu...”
The words of the song’s antiphon resonate off the walls and through eternity. “Thou art My Son, this day I have begotten Thee.”

Peter’s successor bows.

“Introibo ad altare Dei,”
The Bishop of Rome begins the prayers of the Mass. “I will go in unto the altar of God.”

“Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,”
respond the server/priests at his side. “To God Who gives joy to my youth.”

The Holy Father prays for peace.

He is an old man and keeper of the New Covenant. His body is bent and nearly broken by the ancient burden his shoulders have borne for the sake of his brothers. Where they have doubted, he has held firm and unflinching to faith. Where they have despaired, he has held hope high above all darkness. Where they have readily embraced hate, he has simply and always offered love.

“Judica me, Deus...”
The Pope prays before the steps of Saint Peter’s Altar. They are the words of the forty-second Psalm, which every celebrant and his ministers recite as they make private preparation for the miracle of the Mass,
Christ’s bloodless sacrifice. “Judge me, O God, and decide my cause against an unholy people.”

“Emitte lucem tuam et veritatem...”
the Vicar of Christ continues. “Send forth thy light and thy truth; they have conducted me and brought me to thy holy hill, and into thy tabernacles.”

“Et introibo ad altare Dei,”
the servers respond with bows of their heads. “And I will go in unto the altar of God, who gives joy to my youth.”

The Introit ends, music and chanting fading into a deep silence.

The Pope raises his head heavenward, seeing through the marble roof of Bernini’s baldacchino and beyond the gilded dome raised above it. “To Thee, O God, my God, I will give praise upon the harp; why art thou sad, o my soul, and why dost thou disquiet me?”

“Spera in Deo...”
the younger priests intone the last verse of the ancient psalm. “Hope in God, for I will still give praise to Him; the salvation of my countenance and my God.”

“Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto...”
the Holy Father says while crossing his self. “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.”

“As it was in the beginning,” heaven and earth respond. “Is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

Pope and priests repeat the psalm’s antiphon one more time as the rubric of the mass demands.

“Introibo ad altare Dei...”

“Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam.”

His life is failing him, dissipating by the day; but the Bishop of Rome is still a child of God, young in the supernatural life of grace he entered through baptism ninety-two years ago. And young shall he remain and feel in the heart of him until the glory planted by the sacrament of baptism is revealed in him when he is at last with God. The Vicar of Christ feels that it will happen soon enough. He has no doubt that he is celebrating his last Christmas Mass. And now, more so than ever, it is the Mass itself that sustains him, imparting inalterable youth of soul and the promised, blissful immortality that steels him with an invincible optimism against the dark tide of history breaking against the walls of the Vatican.