Without bothering to recover the bunker with the camouflage netting, Acerbi’s men closed the door and drove away. Instantly, the Israeli soldiers were on their feet. Special Forces teams are trained to work independently and take the initiative, and due to the importance of their quarry, they were not about to wait for orders to proceed.
After trying the door and finding that it was locked from the inside, a hefty sergeant attached two small explosive charges to the hinges and backed away. Seconds later, the smoking metal door lay twisted next to the concrete bunker as the men scrambled down the stairway inside. At the bottom of the stairs, the men found themselves standing at the end of a long corridor bathed in red light. It seemed to run on forever under the hill where Acerbi’s hacienda had once stood.
They made a quick check for laser trip beams and other traps before moving cautiously down the long corridor, passing several locked doors and an intersecting corridor that seemed to disappear into infinity in both directions. Acerbi could be anywhere!
Moving farther into the maze, they were surprised by two of Acerbi’s men who charged from behind one of the doors and began firing their weapons. Acerbi’s men were immediately dropped by the advancing Israelis, who were by now becoming spooked by the immense size of the vast underground labyrinth they had just entered.
Suddenly, the lead commando raised his hand and pointed down to the floor. Beneath a thick glass lid that was sealed shut, a large C4 explosive charge was wired to a timer with a red blinking light, and it was counting down.
“Run!”
The commandos turned and began running back the way they had come until they came to a doorway that had been locked but now stood open. Beyond the door was an empty room that contained another blinking red light on top of an explosive charge. The entire place was wired to blow! Time seemed to slow as the men began to run again. Up ahead, they could see the stairway they had descended, but it seemed like they would never reach it in their dream-like race. In their minds, they were already imagining the blast that would soon tear them apart. Run! The stairway was just up ahead, but their boots felt like they were made of lead. Safety was only a few hundred yards away!
The men practically flung themselves toward the stairs and willed themselves upward and out through the open doorway. They kept running. They were desperately trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Acerbi’s underground web when a huge explosion ripped the ground beneath their feet, hurling them forward through the air. The earth around them moved in a visual wave that carried a wall of sound and shock outward from the center of the explosion and littered the surrounding desert with falling dirt and burning debris.
The stunned soldiers lay on the ground, coughing in the thick dust before finally lifting themselves up, each man looking into the eyes of the others as they stood among the dwindling remnants of the swirling maelstrom. Listening to the staccato bursts of surprised shouts coming over their radios, it was obvious that the other teams in the area had been equally stunned by the huge explosion.
In the distance, sporadic gunfire continued to echo across the ranch until finally, an eerie silence began to settle over the desert. Looking back at the smoke coming from the gaping hole in the ground, the Israeli soldiers who had just narrowly escaped death were beginning to feel that something wasn’t quite right. The way in which events had unfolded seemed strange to them, but stranger still was a feeling that Acerbi’s actions had been planned. It was as though he had never intended to win-that he had staged the entire thing just to lure them in close so that they could witness an orgy of self-destruction-but for what possible reason? Shaking the dust from their clothes, they walked to the edge of the giant crater and peered down into what was left of an immense underground web of interconnecting tunnels. If Acerbi was still down there, he was no longer among the living.
By now, the rising sun cast a pale orange light over the desert. Sitting in the sand next to the crashed helicopter, Lev Wasserman watched the smoke of battle drift over the ranch, and as the sun crept higher, they could see hundreds of bodies littering the desert floor between the tall hill and the highway. It reminded him of a painting he had once seen in San Antonio, Texas, at the Alamo, where bodies from both sides lay frozen in death around the front door of the old mission church.
It appeared that Acerbi’s remaining forces were now fleeing across the desert behind the Mexican drug dealers, who had wisely jumped into their SUVs and sped away the moment they saw the first F-15 streak by overhead.
Standing next to Lev, Ben keyed his radio and called the teams in the field. “Any sign of Acerbi?”
“No one’s seen him since he disappeared underground in the area that exploded,” the Team 5 leader radioed back. “Unless he got out somehow, he’s finished.”
Leo and Lev exchanged glances. It couldn’t be that easy … could it? The worn phrase of having nine lives came to mind, but no one wanted to be the first to say it.
“Any prisoners?”
“Just one … a female. She was lying next to the hangar. It looks like she’s the only survivor. The others inside weren’t so lucky.”
A knot began to form in Lev’s stomach as he took the radio from Ben. “Did you say others?”
“Yes, sir … looks like civilians. As near as we can tell, there were about forty to fifty of them in there, but the condition of the bodies makes it kind of hard to tell.”
Lev looked at Ben with an expression of total disbelief. What the hell was Acerbi up to?
“Tell your men to bring the woman to us. We need to speak to her … now.”
“Will do, Professor.”
Ten miles north of the ranch, a leather-clad figure riding a blood-red Ducati racing motorcycle leaned into the wind as he raced up highway 45 toward the city of Juarez. Behind the dark visor of the full-faced helmet, Rene Acerbi was smiling.
He threw his black-gloved fist into the air in a victory salute as his own muffled laugh echoed around the inside of the helmet. Everything had come off perfectly after he had lured the others to his secluded ranch. They had come like bees to nectar. All along he had been worried that the elite group of wealthy men and women who had been a part of his plan from the beginning would one day turn on him and challenge his leadership for a world that was rightfully his. His solution to that potential problem had been a simple one, at least for a man like Rene Acerbi. Now they were all dead, a challenge to no one, and his biggest threat, the Catholic Cardinal and his Israeli friends, would be blamed for their deaths after news leaked out about their vicious military assault against a group of unarmed civilians who had gathered inside a hangar in Mexico for an event that would be labeled by the press as an innocent business conference.
In a few hours he would be boarding a private jet in El Paso, Texas for his flight back to his chateau in France, where he would ascend to the throne of a global empire the likes of which the world had never before seen. He would be glorified by the masses as the one who had saved the world from a viral catastrophe-their savior, for he had left no witnesses to tell them otherwise.
Soon after his return, he would travel to Rome, where he would exact his family’s revenge by abolishing the Catholic Church. A plan seven hundred years in the making would finally come to pass, and soon thereafter, Vatican City would be nothing more than an interesting museum to the superstitions of the past. The world truly would be his oyster. Life was good.