Pandora's Ark by Rick Jones Page B

hoped.
    They prayed.
    They needed.
    And the only person who stood in Bonasero’s way was the all-powerful
Cardinal Angullo.
     

 
     
     
    CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    The outskirts
of Tehran, Iran
     
    Night
had come to Tehran. And the old man lay on the ultra-thin mattress recalling
the moments when such a luxury would have been a blessing in Vladimir Central
Prison.
    Just a simple item, he
regarded, as he lightly brushed his fingertips over the coarse fabric. The
little comforts that better a man’s life, he told himself, can be by the most
minimum of degrees.
    On that first day when the doors of the Vladimir Central
Prison closed behind him, Leonid Sakharov couldn’t even begin to comprehend the
meaning of hardship or fear or degradation, until the bodies of his comrades
began to pile quickly at his feet.
    After having his head shaved, the cuts and scrapes
testament of a dull blade, he was then placed in a cramped cell with three
other men. Two nights later, with the situation serving as a psychological
breakdown as much as physical, they were ordered out of their cell to the
showers, told to spread their legs and feet as they placed their hands against
the wall, and beaten with a baton or rubber truncheon until they had little
reserve left to drag each other back to their cell.
    Those who later complained to the authorities of the
brutality were singled out for worse punishment, which is why Sakharov remained
submissively quiet by giving in to totalitarian rule that governed the system.
    During the nights in his quarters when he froze and his
bones seemed to be as fragile as glass, when not-so-alien screams sounded pained
and distant, he kept his mind active and his eyes closed, drawing mental
pictures of buckyballs and formulas in his mind before committing them to
memory.
    Often in the mud-laden yards, whenever possible, he would
draw diagrams and formulas with the tip of his finger, finding it easier to
actually see what his mind was conceiving, and then filing it away in
his memory, if the concept was scientifically feasible. 
    The buckyballs, the formulations, everything was an escape
in a world that was brutally harsh and unyielding. Cellmates came and went, always
a different and interchangeable face on a seeming rotation to fill the gaps
left behind by those who died by raging disease, torture or suicide. But
Sakharov hung on while his body slowly caved to alternative sicknesses stemming
anywhere from lung ailments to fever. And whereas his body began to regress, his
mind continued to remain sharp.
    On the climatic cusp of weather change, when the conditions
were about to become abysmally cold due to the onset of fall and winter months,
when the tines of his nerve endings began to ache in concert, redemption came
to him in the form of a man he had never met before.
    It began on a damp morning, the old man huddled
beneath a threadbare blanket on his bunk, his knees drawn up in acute angles in
a feeble attempt to keep himself warm. In the early morning light he could see
the cold, wintry vapor of his own breath, causing him to pull the blanket tightly
around him as though it were a second skin.  
    And when he heard the footfalls of the coming
guards he closed his eyes, feigning sleep.
    The door of his cell slid back, the un-oiled squeal of
metal against metal as brutal as life inside Vladimir Central, and then the
hard nudges against the old man’s side with the tip of one the guard’s baton.
    “Get up and come with us,” he said in typical clipped
Russian.
    The old man learned long ago never to question a guard or
to look him in the eyes. Laboring to his feet, shedding the blanket to one
side, Sakharov stood and simply waited for the next command with his head
submissively lowered so that his eyes were cast to the floor.
    One of the guards pressed the baton across his backside and
used it to usher the Old Man out of his cell. “Out and to the right,” he
ordered.
    Sakharov closed his eyes. ‘Out and to the