Erin Go Boom: Tale of a Pius Man

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A Priest & a Terrorist walking to a bar on St. Paddy's Day.
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Father Francis X. Williams watched the fat man walk into the gift shop alcove in the back corner of St. Patrick's Cathedral, and slowly, quietly, pursued him.

Francis, though he preferred Frank, didn't know why he followed the man. There was nothing particularly interesting about him. It was hard to tell what ethnicity he was, since his face was covered in half green and half white makeup, and his hair was dyed an obscene orange—which is what one expected to see on St. Patrick's Day.

The rest of his body, however, that was something else. The man of many colors wore a billowing overcoat that covered what had seemed to be an equally billowing body so obese that it was hard to imagine how he could walk. But there was something uneven about the way the weight distributed, and awkward with how it all settled.

Frank had been a Physician Assistant before he joined the priesthood, and knew that the human body didn't move like that, so there was only one conclusion—the man wore a type of fat suit filled with fluid.

There were plenty of options that went through Frank's mind. This was a prank. Or a stunt. A bet. A dare. Maybe the fat suit was filled with beer, and there was a straw near the collar ...

Stupid, but I've learned that stupid is unpredictable.

Frank moved into the gift shop, and turned down the side aisle, framed exclusively by bookshelves. It looked like the "fat man" had squeezed past the bookcases and had tucked himself into the back of the room.

Frank moved down the other aisle, hoping to run into him ...

Instead, he turned, and found himself looking down the barrel of a gun.

It was not the worst way to go, the priest imagined, but he could think of better ways. He couldn't think of a better place to die than in St. Patrick's Cathedral in the middle of New York City, but he wasn't being given a chance to consider all of his options.

Frank could even recognize the gun ready to kill him as a Beretta M9, a .9mm. It was the weapon of choice for the Special Forces, better known as the Green Berets. The muzzle of the gun had been pressed so close to his eye that Williams could see the bullet in the chamber. These were details that a priest of the Roman Catholic Church generally wouldn't know, but a priest could gather all sorts of miscellaneous facts when he was attached to the Fighting 69th regiment as army Chaplin.

As the muzzle came threateningly close to poking his eye out, the priest considered the situation. The pistol did not have a silencer on it, so he was relatively safe as long as the sound in the main body of the cathedral did not surpass the decibels in a gunshot. Unfortunately, when the cathedral was packed to the brim on St. Patrick's Day, only minutes before the parade began, the sound of tourists and supplicants all in the same room at the same time, even the combined sound of their breathing could conceivably cover up a gunshot.

And at the moment, if the gunman fired, they were behind a bookcase in the St. Patrick's Cathedral gift shop alcove in the back of the church, so who would notice?

With the other eye, the one not looking down the barrel, the priest studied the gunman. Now that Frank knew the man was armed, the nature of the fluid in the man's fat suit was more than a little suspect.

"Pog mo thoin?" Frank said, making the insult sound like a question. The gunman blinked, uncomprehending. He didn't understand the Gaelic insult, so he wasn't an Irish terrorist. He then tried, "A salaam aleikom."

The gunman smiled and bowed his head a little. "You have been to Baghdad; I can hear it in your accent."

"I've blown through it, yes," the priest said softly. "Southern Afghanistan?"

"As you infidels say, you do get around." He smiled. "Were you scared white so young?"

Frank rolled a violet eye up to his silver hair. "A long story. I don't know if you have the time for it. Do you wish to detonate during communion?"

The gunman blinked. "How did you know?"

"You get to move up the center aisle, and you can get maximum impact that way. And you can only have one of two things in that suit—an aerosol weapon or liquid explosive."

He nodded slowly. "Are you in the CIA?"

"No, Opus Dei, but there are at least as many conspiracy theories about us as there are about the CIA." He paused for a moment longer, thinking it over. "Liquid explosive? That would make the most sense, considering that's what Al-Qaeda tried to use in airplane attacks. Why would you blow up a church?" he asked, feigning stupidity. The St. Patrick's Day Parade was a nationally televised event. There would be more cameras pointed at the church to catch the initial blasts as there were covering 9-11. Not only that, but there were military, political, and police personnel of all ranks and levels. The area might as well have screamed "target."

That, of course, assumed that there was just one target at the Cathedral.

The gunman smiled. "What makes you think that we would only attack here, eh? For the next five blocks, we are prepared to rid the world of your people."

Frank nodded slowly. To his mind, "his people" could only mean military forces... most specifically the Fighting 69th, which had returned from Iraq in 2005. The priest reviewed his options. The chemicals in the explosives couldn't have been detonated by simple jostling—if they were as unstable as nitroglycerin, the fat suits would have exploded on any subway ride into the city—but just because the priest didn't see any detonators didn't mean there weren't any. However, the man did have a gun...why would a suicide bomber need to carry a gun? He was a weapon.

"You intend to suicide by cop, don't you?" the priest asked. "In here, you are going to shoot yourself, and outside, your men will start to shoot into the crowd in front of armed police officers marching in the parade. The bullets will set off the explosives."

The gunman's eyes flared. "Who told you!" he boomed. He jabbed the gun at Frank's eyes as the major organ in the loft above them began to ramp up.

The priest bent his knees, dropping his skull below the muzzle of the gun. Both of his hands shot up and grabbed the barrel, bending it backward, and then jerking down, forcing the gunman to either let go or his wrists would break. Fr. Williams yanked the gun back and clubbed it into the bomber's temple, knocking him backwards into a shelf full of prayer cards.

"I'm an army chaplain, and you don't even assume that they teach us anything?" he sighed. He bent forward, and checked to make certain the man was alive, and stationary for a long while.

Fr. Williams then poked out from behind the bookcase to see if anyone had noticed the fracas. They obviously hadn't, which was a good thing. He glanced at his watch and noted that he only had a matter of minutes in order to prevent several bombs from going off and laying waste to a five-block stretch of the St. Patrick's Day parade—the five blocks covered by the cameras. Calling 911 was a thought, but only a fleeting one—even if the 911 switchboard transferred him to the right people immediately, how fast could anyone useful arrive, and would their arrival set off the bombers? If he grabbed a police officer who could communicate immediately with the other uniforms in the area, the bombers would certainly be able to see them coming. There was the same problem of warning the crowds outside—the bombers would know immediately, then set themselves off.

Frank frowned, then peeked out of the gift shop, seeing three policemen in the back of the church. He sprinted forward, grabbed one, then pulled him back to the comatose man, telling him to make sure he didn't move. The cop blinked and nodded, confused.

The priest stepped around the bookcase and slipped in front of the gift shop desk. "May I have the use of a first aid kit? I have a friend who may have sprained something."

The woman at the gift shop desk smiled at him. "Certainly, Father."

She pulled up the kit from behind the desk and popped it open. Frank reached in and slipped out a roll of gauze, using it to camouflage the scissors he took as well. "Thank you."

Father Williams quickly slipped out the back way and flew down the stairs, heading south down 5th Avenue—the direction of the cameras angled for the parade. He scanned the surrounding areas as he scurried down the stone steps. A priest in a rush out of the Cathedral wasn't that big a deal, and black on black was almost never noticed, since black jackets and pants made up the majority of colors half the year anyway.

Frank hit the sidewalk at a fast stride. He didn't have to worry about street traffic. Pedestrians were another matter.

The first person wasn't that hard to find—in fact, Fr. Williams almost ran into him as he made for the curb. Unlike the gunman in the Cathedral, this person was asymmetrical, as though someone had loaded the liquid explosive poorly into the suit. He was on the corner nearest the Cathedral; in a perfect position to be picked up by every camera the news networks had focused on the parade.

Frank smiled at the terrorist gently. "Excuse me."

The man looked at him and blinked. "Hm?"

"I almost ran into you..." He waved it off with his free hand, "Never mind." He glanced across the street, as though looking for someone, then shrugged and moved away.

No one had noticed the incision that Frank had made with the scissors along the terrorist's outer thigh. The man was standing directly over a storm drain, so all of the explosive would flow out of his suit and into the sewer before he had even known he had been disarmed.

Frank was a block away in less than a minute, his clerical collar a opening a pathway through the crowd once people noticed him...if they noticed him.

Unfortunately, the next terrorist was easy to spot, because he was surrounded by people, including a baby in a stroller with a shamrock sticker on his cheek—the baby kicked the man's leg, and he wobbled without seeming to notice. The bomber was pushed up against the metal barricades that separated the pedestrians from the parade, crammed in with no way to grab him.

The priest frowned briefly, observing the men and women around the terrorist. One big and burly man with a child on his shoulders, and next to him was a smaller woman wearing a backpack with numerous NYPD patches.

Father Williams thought over the risks. He had to assume the terrorists all had guns, but if they struck now, five minutes before the parade started, the entire point of their day would be wasted. If any one of them acted prematurely, all of them would have to detonate on the assumption that their plan was blown.

The question was how many of them would risk early discovery if they were unsure?

He inhaled deeply and then screamed in a tenor voice "Fire!"

For obviously explosive reasons, the terrorist was the one who jumped the highest. And since he was oddly weighed down, and crammed in against a police barricade that was barely holding the crowd back to begin with, he spilled out into the street. He landed on an empty Guinness bottle someone had left on the curb, and the glass shattered, shredding his suit to pieces. As he stood up, children started laughing at the terrorist because they assumed he had wet himself.

The woman with the patched backpack leaned forward to help him.... until she noticed the pistol at his hip that had been previously concealed by his bulk. She quickly unslung her pack and swung it into his face, dropping him back to the street.

Fr. Williams had darted away before the terrorist had even started to get up.

The third terrorist was possibly the easiest to spot, and possibly the dumbest. Like the others, he had adopted the idea of dressing in the colors of the Irish flag—white, orange, and green. The problem was that he had dyed his hair green, his face white, and his body was covered in a gigantic orange overcoat. Since Orangemen were representative of the Protestant half of the Northern Ireland equation, wearing that much Orange to a St. Patrick's Day parade was the equivalent of wearing a swastika armband in a synagogue.

To make the irony even sweeter, the bomber had hidden himself in a cluster of men holding signs that read "England Get Out of Ireland."

This is too easy, he thought to himself.

Fr. Frank slipped off his cardboard roman collar and took out a pen, scribbled a message on it, then reached in between the parade goers to slap it high on the man's back, just below his neck. The terrorist couldn't feel it through the fat suit.

The priest wasn't even ten feet away when he heard the sounds of a man being beaten into a new incarnation.

Maybe I should have found something more tame to write on his back than "I hate the IRA."

The next one, a block over, was taken down with medical precision. Frank slipped up behind the terrorist, who was dressed in a Fighting Irish jacket so new the price tag was still on it, and disarmed him with two slashes of the scissors—one across the buttocks and another just below the scapula. The first slash started emptying the suit of liquid explosive, and the second cut the straps holding the lower part of the suit up, so the man's pants literally fell down around his ankles, tripping him when he turned to see what had happened to the fluid weight he felt rush out of him.

Unfortunately, it was a move too blatant and too visible. As the priest stepped away from the bomber, he looked down the street for his final target and found another "obese" man looking squarely at him.

Frank looked down the street and saw the Fighting 69th was only two blocks away.

The bomber looked at him, then at the regiment coming his way, and then darted down the side street.

Frank blinked, but saw no choice other than to follow...there was still the same problem about getting a uniformed officer, or calling in to 911, and it was even worse this time, now that the bomber knew he was being chased.

The side streets of New York City on St. Patrick's Day were far tamer than 5th Avenue itself. Despite wearing the fat suit, the bomber could move with some speed. Fr. Williams didn't know why the man hadn't rushed towards the 69th and died in a ball of fire. He could have decided that it would have been better to die some other way, or maybe even circle around to blow up a specific group of people that absolutely had to die... or possibly he was going to call to whatever was home base and have them make preparations for a contingency plan.

The bomber was only half a block ahead of him when he turned left. Frank turned to follow him, and saw the terrorist dive into a bar.

Frank slowed down as he approached. A suicide bomber who had just been thwarted ran into a crowded bar...and didn't blow up?

The priest thought for a moment. Attacking the 69th dead on would not have been effective if the bomber was gunned down in the middle of the street before getting close to them, so circling around made sense...

But then again, the terrorist wouldn't need to rush if Fr. Williams were dead.

Logically, the suicide bomber must have concluded that the priest was alone—clergy generally do not go out hunting terrorists by themselves if they could avoid it. If Frank called the police and let them go into the bar, the man would certainly self-destruct. If Frank went in, the terrorist would almost certainly be able to kill him, then make it back to the parade... but even if that did happen, there was always the chance that the men on parade would gun him down before he got too close enough to the crowds ...

Fr. Williams sighed and moved in after his prey.

It turned out to be one of those narrow pubs with a bar that went the length of the room. Frank immediately ran into one end of the bar, and the bartender saw his shirt immediately. The bartender, a large beefy man, smiled at him. "Lose your collar, padre?"

Frank smiled. "You could say that. Two beers please."

The bartender reached down and slid two cold ones onto the bar top. "Anything for the clergy. Keep them, it's on the house."

"Thank you kindly. Have you seen a rather large gentleman come through here?"

The bartender nodded over Frank's shoulder. "Right there," he said, and turned to the other end of the bar.

Frank felt the gun jab into his ribs. He grabbed one beer and thrust it at the bomber as though it were a weapon. "Hello again, nice to meet you. Have a drink, eh?"

"I do not drink. Infidels like you surely at least understand that, do you not?"

"You're in an Irish bar on St. Patrick's Day, and I'm plainly offering you a drink, do you want to stand out?"

The bomber gave a low growl and snatched the bottle. Before he could drink, Fr. Williams added, "You might want to give a toast...it's also traditional."

The bomber's eyes narrowed. In the two minutes he had been in the bar, he had heard at least five individual toasts made by drunken infidels, so that much was true. "I wouldn't know who to toast."

"I do. There's a hero in Irish history, a name I think you'd appreciate." He told him.

The bomber sighed and, never taking his eyes off of the priest, bellowed out in a loud voice, "Here's to Oliver Cromwell, the greatest hero to have ever graced Ireland."

The first thing that went through his mind after that was a baseball bat, swung courtesy of the bartender, hoping to preempt a riot on his best business day of the year.

However, it only got worse from there.

Two hours later, Captain Frank McShane of the NYPD stood in front of Fr. Frank, taking his statement, and even he blinked at the priest's last maneuver. "Ouch. Why didn't you just have him toast Yassir Arafat at a meeting of the Israeli Defense Force?"

Fr. Williams smiled gently. "I couldn't find anyone from the IDF around."

The policeman slid away his notepad and sat across from Frank, in the back of the bar, which was technically a crime scene. "So, I have just one more question. Are you really a priest?"

Frank sighed. "Yes, I'm a priest. Why does everyone keep asking me?"

McShane laughed. "Because priests generally don't go commando on terrorists."

"Oh." He smiled. "Well, I wasn't always a priest, you see. I used to be a Green Beret."

"Special Forces? Don't they run Black Ops for the CIA or something?"

Fr. Williams smiled and leaned back in his chair. "Maybe."

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3 Comments
pope32767pope32767about 13 years ago
Minor nit

You don't actually come into NYC by subway, unless you take the PATH from New Jerseyt. You come in by train, bus, or airplane. Once inside, you do travel by subway.

AnonymousAnonymousabout 13 years ago
And the cry was No Surrender,

to terrorist scum. Of course one mans terrorist scum is anothers freedom fighter. IRA or Al queda? -- UK CYNIC. SDL

estragonestragonabout 13 years ago
Liked It Very Much

The local color is good, the character believable, and the pacing is quick and holds one's attention. No grammatical or syntactical errors (I can't speak to the technical side, not being a terrorist myself).

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