Vatican Knights by Rick Jones

an
air pocket, causing the plane to dip sharply. When it leveled off Kimball
recalled the moments of his pride, a deadly sin in the eyes of God. And his
fall had come to him quickly.
    He had been in Iraq for seven days
and was making his way toward Baghdad when he happened upon a flock of goats
herded by two boys, the older no more than fourteen, the younger perhaps ten,
each carrying a gnarled staff of olive wood. 
    Kimball remained out of sight,
with his back pressed against the sandy wall of a gully, listening to the goats
bleating only a few feet away. And then a shadow cast over him from the younger
boy, who had spied Kimball from above. The child’s small body was silhouetted
against the pure white sun, a diffusion of light shining from him like a halo.
And then the boy was gone, shouting, 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 ground. The older boy stood unmoving with his mouth
open in mute protest, his eyes moving to the body of his brother, to Kimball,
then back to his brother. When he took flight Kimball took a single shot, the
bullet killing the boy before he hit the surface.
    Another bump of turbulence, this
time stronger, jarred Kimball from the memory. But when the plane settled back
into a smooth flight pattern, he closed his eyes once again and remembered what
he had for so long tried to forget.
    He had buried the boys and their
staffs in the trench. Wordlessly, Kimball Hayden covered their bodies with sand
and scattered the goats. Once done, he sat beside the two small rises in the
earth and considered that maybe the White House brass was right after all.
Maybe he was inhuman.
    And suddenly it was no longer a
game. The memory of his father’s approval on that Friday night when Kimball
openly maimed another player, the smile on his father’s face, and the
subsequent pats on the back no longer seemed to matter. He could not go on
living life as a game in which those around him were merely targets—especially
innocent children.
    At that moment Kimball was greatly
tormented by what he had done. His cold fortitude was gone. He had reached his
limit. And though he could hear his father rage on about pushing further, he
could not. Every man has his limits. 
    If his father had been alive on
that fateful day rather than buried in a nondescript grave in an obscure
township, he most likely would have turned his back on his son, but Kimball
didn’t care anymore. His father was dead. Why was he still living for his
approval? Why had he ever fought so hard to please a sadistic man who required
him to deny his humanity? Kimball didn’t want to be emotionless anymore. He
deserved to feel pain, to feel guilt. He wanted to suffer.
    Kimball remained by the makeshift
graves all that day. Even with the sun blistering his lips, he refused to take
cover. He recalled the moments when day turned to night. He laid 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 sky filled with countless stars, Kimball Hayden
made a fateful decision.
    On the following morning he headed
back for the Syrian border with President Bush and the JCS never to hear from
him again. The White House believed that Kimball Hayden had been killed in the
commission of his duty. Less than two months later, the man who was considered
to be without conscience was posthumously honored by the Pentagon brass, though
the true nature of his contributions was never made public.
    Two weeks after his defection,
however, while Kimball sat in a bar in Venice drinking an expensive liqueur,
the United States and the Coalition Forces attacked Iraq.
    He had been drinking and