The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE (37 page)

Congressman Lamar Reed nods a greeting at the young men. They both wear First Lieutenant’s bars.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you Congressman,” the young, white man says in a thick Alabaman accent. “I was a big fan of your basketball career.”

His companion nods enthusiastically and swallows. “Same here Congressman.” His accent is Texan.

Reed glances at the names stitched into their uniforms. “Thank you Mr. Romero. Mr. Alvarez.”

“You can call me Anthony, sir.”

“And my name is Salvador. Sal, if you like.”

“O.K., Anthony, Sal.”

“I always thought it was a shame that you cut your career short for a life in politics,” Anthony Romero says.

“And miss all this?” Lamar gestures to his surroundings. “Not a chance.”

The two men chuckle.

Lamar smiles. “Tell me, gentlemen, what is going on here? What do you people hope to accomplish?”

“We’re taking our country back, sir,” Anthony answers while his friend nods and chews through a new mouthful.

“Taking it back from whom?” O’Neill asks.

“We’re taking it back from all those intent on destroying it, sir.”

“Can you be a little more specific son,” Morton Gallagher interjects. “Last time I checked that was a mighty long list.”

“You noticed that too, huh?” Anthony says and shovels a forkful of peas and carrots into his mouth.

“We have a government to handle them, Mr. Romero,” President O’Neill says.

“With all due respect Mr. President,”’ Alvarez says. “The government has done so lousy a job you couldn’t blame the people for wondering just whose side you’re on.”

“That’s why we have just fired the government,” Romero adds.

“What gives you the right to fire the government?” O’Neill asks.

“Your incompetence,” Romero answers bluntly.

“Our right to self-determination and survival,” Alvarez adds. “We have all manner of reasons for getting rid of the lot of you.”

“Is Forrester your leader?” Morton Gallagher asks. “Is he the mastermind behind this coup?”

The two young men shake their heads.

“Is it Pereira?” Annie asks.

“As we say in church,” Sal answers. “Bingo!”

“Colonel Miguel Pereira?” The President has to ask. The look on his face however indicates that he would just as rather not know the answer.

“The very same,” says Romero.

“The American people will never stand for this,” Annie protests.

“We’ll see about that,” Alvarez replies with a smile.

“You’re committing treason, young man,” the President says. “You do realize that, don’t you?”

“One man’s treason is another man’s revolution,” Romero states with a shrug.

“Have you checked out your approval ratings lately Mr. President?” Alvarez adds. “Have you checked out Congresses’ approval ratings, Mr. Reed? Your numbers are in the toilet, gentlemen. If I were y’all, I wouldn’t expect too many people to run to my rescue.”

“Whatever the people may think of a particular administration is not going to keep them from defending the system itself,” Lamar says.

“More than half the people in the country don’t vote and half of those that do don’t believe it matters much anymore which way they go,” Sal says. “The two parties are a joke! They’re two faces of the same worthless coin. The American people are sick and tired of government as it exists. They’re sick and tired of
the system
. We’re guessing there will be a less than robust defense of it when we tear it down.”

“I’d say they’re not going to miss any of it or any of you,” Anthony adds. “You’re both out of jobs, I’m afraid.”

“Just like half the country, thanks to
the system
,” Alvarez says and forks a lump of cornbread stuffing into his mouth.

“Don’t worry though Congressman,” Romero continues. “I’m sure the Chicago Bulls would still love to have you. We don’t have any designs on the NBA.”

Alvarez jabs Romero approvingly with an elbow and gives Lamar a wink. Grinning mischievously under their camouflage Santa caps, the two suddenly appear every bit the ‘evil Christmas elves’ Annie Cooper called them.

“What does your Colonel hope to offer the country in our stead?” Lamar asks, ignoring their teasing.

“A Christian Republic,” Salvador answers.

Annie Cooper snorts. “You mean a theocracy.”

“I mean exactly what I said, lady,” Alvarez says sharply. “A Christian republic.”

“Let me guess,” Annie continues. “In your Christian republic abortion and gay marriage will be outlawed.”

“And that’s just on day one,” Romero says.

The two soldiers laugh and butt shoulders.

The exchange between Annie and the two young men chills the air at the table. Everyone is silent for several long moments. The tables around them have also fallen quiet as they eavesdrop. Congressman Reed is wondering how to proceed when he notices the cassock and the Roman collar. The man wearing them is tall, his large, sun-bronzed face in a halo of white hair and beard. On the double-take, the Congressman notices that he is also missing an eye. The priest enters the mess hall through the eastern tunnel. The soldiers, beginning with those nearest him, rise to their feet in waves as table after table becomes aware of his presence. In seconds, Lamar Reed and his party find themselves sitting in a forest of straight-backed bodies standing at military attention.

“Merry Christmas Father,” they say in one voice.

“God bless you, my children,” the priest responds. His voice is strong, clear and foreign.

The soldiers drop to one knee and bow their heads. The Congressman can see the priest again as he makes a sweeping sign of the cross in the air.

“God be with you,” the priest says. “
In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritu Sancte. Amen
.”

The soldiers rise to their feet.

“Thank you, Father,” they say, again in one voice.

Lamar and the others exchange looks as everyone settles back onto their benches and return to their meals and conversations. One by one, in short order, the kidnapped party find themselves looking at the priest. He is mak
ing his way from table to table, chatting briefly with each before blessing them and moving on to the next. At one table, a female soldier pins a bright, yellow, smiley face button on the left breast of his cassock. He admires it for a moment and thanks the young woman before moving on to the next group of soldiers. As he approaches Reed’s table, the Congressman makes out more details. The patch over his left socket has the sheen of silk or maybe satin. Tiny diamonds, studded in a cross, glitter at its center. The pectoral cross that swings under the priest’s beard as he moves is the three-barred cross seen more frequently in the East.

When the priest stops at their table, Alvarez, Romero and the women on the other end greet him with a hearty, “Merry Christmas Father!”

The priest accepts their well wishes with a smile and a nod of his white head. The priest’s one eye is large, a liquid amber-brown in color and deep set between a high cheekbone and a broad, creased forehead. The eye of the priest sweeps slowly up one bench and down the other, acknowledging everyone, soldier and President’s party, one by one, with the same glowing, gold-glinted regard.

“Good evening,” the priest says with another bow of his head. “And God bless you all.”

Lamar’s ear identifies the priest’s accent as French, but it has a twist the Congressman cannot identify.

“My name is Father Rafiq Hermez,” the priest says when his head is raised to them again. “I am glad to make your acquaintance. If there is anything I can do to make your stay with us more comfortable, you need but ask.”

They are silent for a long moment as they wait for President O’Neill to respond. In that short spell Reed notices that the button on the priest’s breast is only suggesting a smiley face. Sitting three feet from the thin, tall and strangely Santa-esque priest, Lamar makes out the details of the bright button. The letters,
H. I.
are the eyes in the suggestion of the face; the sentence,
‘We are here to help!’
is curved beneath them in a smile-like arc.

“Thank you, Father,” says the President. “But the only thing we want is to be out from under this mountain.”

“I’m afraid that I can only counsel patience in that matter, Mr. President,” Father Hermez says. “Mr. Forrester has promised to release you in twelve days. I assure you, he can be counted on to keep his word. He is an honorable man.”

“Give me a break, Padre,” Gallagher says. “The man is betraying his country. Where is the honor in that?”

“Mr. Forrester, like the soldiers gathered here under this mountain, would have you draw a greater distinction between the country and the government,” says the Priest. “It is for the honor and preservation of the country they love that they are overthrowing the present government.”

“We don’t overthrow governments in America,” the President says. “We elect new ones.”

“Do you?” The Priest asks with a smile. “Now, I admit that I am not an American, but they are.” Father Hermez gestures broadly to include everyone in the mess hall. “They tell me that there hasn’t been an appreciable difference between any of the administrations of the last hundred years or so.”

“You tell them, Padre!” Alvarez says.

“Nothing new is allowed under Washington’s sun,” Anthony Romero says. “Republican or Democrat, it has been the same story since the beginning of the twentieth century. Every administration has pursued the same end, the aggrandizement, enriching and empowering of the central authority in Washington.”

“And so you want to replace what we have by further centralizing power into the hand of one man, Colonel Pereira?” Congressman Reed asks. “Is that what you’re offering Father, that we replace our two parties with a party of one, a dictator?”

The one-eyed priest smiles indulgently. “As part of the overthrown government, Congressman Reed, it is only natural that you would look upon the Colonel as a dictator, but we have the hope that you and the American people will, in time, see him as a liberator.”

The priest makes another sweeping gesture to the room. “They already do.”

Congressman Reed looks around to see smiling, nodding faces everywhere. “So where is the good Colonel?”

“He’s in the White House,” Father Hermez answers. “He will address the world from the Oval Office tomorrow.”

“And when will he address us, Mr. Priest?” Annie Cooper asks. “When will he address the President of The United States?”

The priest fixes his eye and smile on Annie Cooper. “Tomorrow, from the Oval Office, Colonel Pereira will address the whole world.”

Priest and FBI agent stare at each other with a silent intensity that quickly grows awkward. Their eyes are probing and searching but their faces are still, the priest’s fixed in a smile and Agent Cooper’s in a glare.

“Where are you from, Padre?” Morton Gallagher asks to break the spell.

“Bethlehem,” the priest answers.

“You’re a long way from home, Father,” Congressman Reed says.

“Yes,” Father Rafiq Hermez answers, his eye taking on an inward and almost baleful look.

“So what’s your connection to this mess?” Gallagher asks.

The priest is drawn back out of himself by Morton’s question. “Providence brought the good Colonel and me together some years ago in Jerusalem. Quite by chance we struck up a conversation in a little café by the Mediterranean. I learned the Colonel was a soldier scorned by his country and he learned that I was a priest shorn of a parish. Together we lamented the deplorable condition of our world and the persecution that Christendom suffers throughout it. Here in America, the persecutions were just beginning, but Colonel Pereira rightly feared they would escalate in short order. In the East, things are much worse for Christians, have been so for a long time. For decades, my fellow Maronites in Palestine and Lebanon, Chaldeans in the north and the Copts in Egypt were being systematically exterminated or forced into exile from their homelands. As bad as it was, things got decidedly worse during that time your press referred to, so glowingly, as the ‘Arab Spring.”

“Is that when you were ‘shorn of your parish,’ as you put it, Father?” Lamar asks.

“Yes,” the priest answers with a heavy nod of his white head. “Hamas soldiers burst into our church during the Mass one of those ‘Arab Spring’ mornings and machine gunned their way down the pews. They saved me for last. They wanted to make sure I got a good look at the carnage before they shot me in the head.

“By the Grace of God I survived with only the loss of an eye and my sense of smell. I was very fortunate that neighbors rushed into the church after the gunmen left. They pulled out the three of us who were still breathing. At considerable risk to themselves, those wonderful souls hid and nursed us as best they could. Faraj and Jeeda eventually died of their wounds, but I somehow
survived. Somehow for some reason that I did not understand until I met Colonel Miguel Pereira.”

“And what reason is that, Father?” President O’Neill wants to know. “Do you believe God spared you just so you could serve as chaplain in the Colonel’s renegade army?”

“More than that, Mr. President,” the priest answers excitedly. He taps the yellow button on his chest. “The Colonel has appointed me the head of the Revolution’s Homeland Inquisition.”

“Homeland what?” the President asks incredulously.

“Inquisition!?!” Annie Cooper bursts out loud. She looks from the priest to Salvador Alvarez who winks at her again. “Templars? Christian republic? You want to drag us back into the dark ages! Is that what you crazy cultists want?”

The priest smiles at Annie. “I dare say child, there is no age darker than the present one.”

“I’m not your child, Cyclops,” Annie says.

“The Medieval period which you denigrate as dark was, in fact, gloriously suffused with light compared to our present, degenerate age,” Father Hermez continues unperturbed. “The only cultists here, my child, are you good people. You are members of the cult of modernism, which is a very toxic mix of heresies, responsible for the present sorry and tragic state of man and the world. This cult of yours encourages a dangerously inordinate self-regard in the average modernist. That is why you are so ready to look down your nose at ancestors that were in every meaningful way superior to you.”