The Goliath Chamber - Vatican Knights 24 (2021) by Rick Jones (good novels to read .TXT) 📗

chance to liberate the woman. I want him to see the fear in her eyes the moment she’s put down. I want him to know that in the end, he was powerless to do anything to save her. All threats to kill the woman should he stray from the instructions given him were nothing more than tools to assure that he comes alone and weaponless. And now he’s here . . . as promised.” After a moment, she quickly added, “Retrieve him, Stallworth, and bring him to the bunker. Show him the woman. After you kill her, then take him out. Two to center mass and one to the head. The last thing I want is for Kimball Hayden to resurface another day like a rabid dog coming to clean house.”

“Understood.”

“For some reason, the vehicle fell short of the given coordinates,” she told him, “about six hundred yards.”

“Yeah, I know. Bienemy and I watched the vehicle approach—saw the lights. And then they went off.”

“Find him . . . And use caution. There’s nothing worse than fighting something that uses the dark to his advantage like a Vatican Knight.”

“Copy that.”

Antle tapped her earbud to kill the communication and watched the monitor of her laptop. The glow and throb of the red dot remained unmoving, suggesting that the vehicle remained short of its programmed GPS coordinates.

Grabbing a cigarette, Antle lit it while watching the screen and wondering: What exactly are you up to, Kimball Hayden?

She would soon get her answer.

* * *

Bienemy and Stallworth were experienced operators who practiced their skillsets in theaters of operation across the globe, especially in the Middle East where they had sharpened their abilities to near perfection.

Moving through the thicket with silence and grace, the only thing that gave away their positions were the soft green glows of their NVG lenses which, while hovering in space, appeared like fireflies. When they neared the vehicle that had been driven by Kimball Hayden, neither man could see a driver behind the wheel.

Stallworth signaled to Bienemy to check ahead while covering him with his assault weapon. Nodding, Bienemy left the brush area with the point of his rifle raised to eye level, moving forward.

In the shallow light of a half moon, Bienemy reached the car. With his weapon directed at the windshield, and then at the side windows while carefully circling the vehicle, he thoroughly examined his locational sphere which included underneath the car and its immediate surroundings.

Nothing.

He continued to orbit the vehicle with his weapon raised and directed for a fast trigger pull. And then he opened the passenger-side door. Sitting on the passenger seat was the hexagon-shaped tracker with its light burning an angry red, but no Kimball.

Bienemy tapped his earbud and whispered, “The target’s on foot and nowhere near the elected site.” After a long moment of silence, Bienemy said, “You copy that, Stallworth?”

More silence, the lack of sound in itself oddly blaring.

“Stallworth, do you read?”

Silence.

Bienemy, an ex-SEAL, scoped his surroundings through his NVG lenses. The landscape was lime green with every brush, tree and leaf discernable. He could see the slight movement of limbs stirred by the course of a light breeze, and the area where Stallworth had maintained his post, which was now vacant.

“Stallworth?”

Receiving no answer, Bienemy moved ahead with four of the five pounds necessary for the trigger pull.

* * *

Stallworth had moved from his position to give himself a better vantage point. With more of an advantageous and unobstructed view, he watched Bienemy round the vehicle with his weapon poised for a quick burst. Stallworth didn’t see the need for dramatics since he opted for the quick and simple kill the moment of Kimball Hayden’s arrival. But apparently, the Vatican Knight had intuited the blueprint of his assassination. And now he was using the shadows to move closer to the bunker that held Shari Cohen, while he and Bienemy wasted time in a fruitless search.

With Mannix and McKinley watching the fort as the second line of defense, Stallworth was about to tap his earbud to communicate with base command when a pair of hands reached from behind, with one hand grabbing Stallworth’s mask by the chin while a second hand pressed against the back of the SEAL’s head. And in that moment of time as the ex-SEAL began to register his fate, he realized that he had been remiss. He should have been more aware and in tune with his surroundings—should have been a part of it. Instead, he realized his faux pas for believing that a Vatican Knight was little more than a fake practitioner when it came to warfare. He should have listened to the woman.

The hands that gripped him gave a vicious jerk that snapped the bones of Stallworth’s neck like dry kindling. The crack, though audible, did not draw the attention of Bienemy, who was opening the car door to the passenger side.

In the shadows, a shape that was blacker than black leaned over and stripped the Nocturnal Saint of his weapon, a suppressed assault rifle. But what he cherished most was the combat knife that had been strapped to Stallworth’s thigh. After removing the sheath and strapping apparatus, he quickly donned the weapon, removed the knife, and began to toy with it to get a feel of its heft and balance. Like a skilled majorette who twirled a baton with mastered efficiency, Kimball Hayden was just as talented. The knife twirled effortlessly between his fingers in blinding revolutions. Once he completed the maneuvers, Kimball slid the knife into its sheath the same way a gunslinger pockets his six-shooter, with fluid motion.

Then he watched his quarry from afar.

As the second operative drew back from the vehicle and hit his earpiece, Kimball knew he was trying to communicate with the man who was lying supine at his feet. When every attempt to connect with his associate had fallen short, that was when the operative started to approach Kimball’s position where, inside the shadows, the Vatican Knight