Removing his glasses and placing them on the armrest, the pope ran a hand along a face that had grown into tired folds of flesh, and then proceeded to caress away the burning itch from eyes that were once strikingly blue, but had grayed during his tenure as pope. The intelligence behind them, however, remained firmly intact, and the color grayness of steel, a prominent indicator of his mettle.
With a prayer issuing softly from between his lips, as his words began to trail, Pope Pius fell asleep with his hands slowly drifting apart, and then falling idly to his sides.
The images came to him every night.
Behind the dusty scrim wall of an oppressive sand storm figures followed in his wake. In a world that was the color of desert sand with sand clouds blotting out the sun, the man was constantly mired in a world that moved with the slowness of a bad dream. Pressing forward against the buffeting winds with the tail of his tattered cloak flapping behind him like a banner in a strong wind, and with his face partially covered with a smudged cloth bearing the telltale signs of a lifelong journey, the man moved toward an unknown horizon.
And the dead followed him.
Behind the desert veil followed two masses, their features undulating shadows breaking apart then coalescing, but never uniform as their mournful whispers blended with the soughing of the desert wind.
And then the man closed his eyes as he stood on top of a large dune, the granules of sand rolling like waves across the desert terrain, the tail of his cloak waving steadily behind him. Here he was, the dictator over a kingdom in which no one else cared to rule.
So he moved on, marching through this quagmire looking for a savior in a distant land that might not be.
And the shadows followed, the two shepherd boys he killed a lifetime ago.
Their voices were soft and sweet, their melodic tones almost lost within the course of the wind. Yet the message was always clear: “No matter how far you try to run, Hell will always follow.”
At this juncture Kimball Hayden woke with a sharp pain in his head akin to a mule kick to the temple. By Freudian standards everything playing in his mind was easy to determine, but difficult to let go.
Why? The answer was simple: Because he had set his path long ago.
Several years ago he was team leader of the Force Elite, a group of special commandos who did Black Ops known only by the president of the United States and the reigning members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Since targeted assassinations had been banned by the Ford administration in ‘76, secret meetings were always the norm in the Situation Room in which the ban went virtually unnoticed by future presidents and the JCS.
By military design he was a Black-Op commando primed to work on foreign soils as an assassin. And in 1990 he was assigned to kill three key members of Saddam Hussein’s Cabinet who were responsible for brokering deals with Russian dissidents for high-grade plutonium. Not only was the plutonium not delivered, but the brokers were found shot to death in Chelyabinsk, Russia, by a Rav-.22LRHA, Mossad’s weapon of choice for assassinations. This weapon was also the red herring that ultimately led to the finger pointing at Israel.
From that moment on, Iraq never attempted to develop a nuclear arsenal in earnest.
Then in 1991, he was asked to commit another assassination. This time the objective was Saddam Hussein.
The moment Iraq ventured onto Kuwaiti soil to pillage the country, the United States and its Middle Eastern coalition ordered Hussein to withdraw from the country immediately. However, several weeks of wasted negotiation took place before the commencement of the counterattack by U.S. and coalition forces. But it was during this period that President Bush and his top-ranking members from the JCS called upon Kimball to take out Hussein before the allied assault began, believing war could be averted if the file and rank of the Republican Guards fell into disarray because Hussein was no longer manning the helm. The imminent withdrawal of troops from Kuwaiti soil would certainly be guaranteed before the approach of coalition forces.
However, as the window of opportunity slowly closed while negotiations continued, Kimball breached his way onto Iraqi territory asking no questions and killing simply because it was obligatory. It was this icy-cold fortitude with all the forbearance of a heartless instrument that led White House circles to consider Kimball as a glimmering shadow that possessed no conscience, remorse or care. As far as the White House was concerned, Kimball Hayden was the perfect killing machine. And he prided himself with that image, regarding himself as someone larger than life.
On the seventh day while working his way toward Baghdad, he happened upon a flock of goats herded by two shepherd boys, the older no more than fourteen, the younger no less than ten, each carrying a gnarled staff of olive wood.
Kimball remained stealthily out of view with his back pressed against the sandy wall of a gully, listening to the goats bleating a few feet away. And then a shadow cast over him from the younger boy who had spied him from above. The child’s small body was silhouetted against the pure white sun, a diffusion of light shined behind him like a halo. And then the boy was gone, shouting a warning, the sun assaulting Kimball’s eyes with a sudden and terrible brightness.
Kimball stood, immediately engaged his weapon, drew a bead and pulled the trigger, the bullet’s momentum driving the boy hard to the sand-laden surface with plumes of dust going airborne the moment he impacted the ground. The older boy stood unmoving with his mouth open in mute protest, a perfect O, his eyes moving to the body of his brother, to Kimball, and then back to his brother. When he took flight Kimball took a single shot, the bullet killing the boy before he hit the ground.
That night he buried the children and their staffs within the trench.
With no spoken words of piety, Kimball Hayden covered their bodies with sand and scattered the goats. Once the task was completed he sat between the two small rises in the earth and thoughtfully considered that perhaps the White House cronies were right after alclass="underline" maybe he was less than human, someone without the will or reasoning to determine the difference between right or wrong, a man who pressed onward by cold obligation.
For hours he mused and reexamined himself in self-consideration.
And when day turned to night, after the sun blistered his lips, he refused to take cover as he lay between the two mounds with a clawed hand on each rise of soft earth and prayed for forgiveness — not from God, but from the boys.
His only answer was the soft whisper of wind through the desert sand.
As he lay there watching the moon make its trajectory across a field marked with countless pinpricks of light, Kimball Hayden made a decision.
On the following morning he headed for the Syrian border with President Bush and the JCS never to hear from him again, the White House notion being that he was killed during the commission of his duty. Less than two months into the campaign against Iraq, the man who was considered to be without conscience was posthumously honored by the Pentagon brass.
Two weeks after his defection, however, while sitting in a bar in Venice drinking an expensive liqueur, the United States and the Coalition Forces attacked Iraq. It was at this same bar that a man wearing a Roman Catholic collar and cherubic smile took the seat opposite him without permission.
“I really want to be alone, Father,” he told him. “It’s too late for me, anyway.”
Nevertheless, the priest continued to smile. “We’ve been watching you,” he told him.