Free Strike Force Alpha by Mack Maloney

loud.
    He slowly got to his feet, stepped over his wife, and retrieved his eyeglasses. He pulled the torn curtains from the bedroom’s broken window and looked out.
    The night sky was on fire. A red-and-orange spire of flame was rising out of the west. Tino wiped his glasses clean and then realized the flames were coming from the top of Monte Fidelo, the tallest peak in a line of remote hills outside Sardarno. Monte Fidelo was nearly 2,000 feet high—and four miles away from Tino’s farmhouse. Yet the glow was so intense, his roosters were crowing. It was that bright outside.
    Tino finally had gone to help his wife when the telephone rang. Stepping over her again, he picked it up to hear the very anxious voice of the village mayor on the other end. The mayor was 91 years old but still a pistol. Tino couldn’t believe he’d been able to dial his phone number so fast.
    The mayor had also been thrown from his bed—and he lived inside the village, more than five miles from the peak. He asked if Tino’s house was still intact; the explosion had been so violent, he’d assumed everything between the village and Fidelo had been leveled.
    Tino replied that his house was still standing, but that it looked like the summit of the Fidelo was engulfed in flame. Was it an eruzione, the mayor asked him urgently. An eruption of a volcano? That’s what everyone in the village thought. People were fleeing toward the sea, many still in bedclothes, expecting to be overtaken by lava at any moment.
    Tino didn’t think this was a volcanic eruption. A plane crash, maybe. Nevertheless, the mayor ordered him to get as close as he could to the hill and investigate. Tino began to protest. They’d received an order from the Carabinieri, the Italian national police, earlier that very day telling them to stay away from Monte Fidelo and keep any civilians away from the peak as well. (This was not a hard thing to do, as the area was very isolated and only one dirt road ran in and out.) No official reason was given for this order, but the national police had been adamant.
    “Maybe this is why they didn’t want us to go near it,” Tino reasoned to the mayor. He knew a little more about Monte Fidelo than he was letting on.
    But the mayor couldn’t have cared less about the Carabinieri . He was convinced Monte Fidelo was erupting and he wanted Tino to go up there and prove him wrong.
    Tino just shrugged and hung up. Orders were orders and the mayor was his boss. So Tino slipped on his boots, grabbed his rifle, and headed out the door. As he passed over his wife, still on the floor, he heard her gently snoring.
    No reason to wake her up now, he thought.
     
    Tino jumped into his Toyota jeep and began driving west, toward the glowing hill.
    There was a villa at the top of Fidelo. It was very old, with 12 rooms and a spectacular view of the Mediterranean, a mile over some very rough terrain to the south. In telling Tino to stay away from the hilltop the Carabinieri had also asked him to report any unusual activity around the area, but again they never said why. Just after receiving their communiqué, Tino had called a friend at the state police base in Palermo asking if he knew what it was all about. He did. The villa had recently been leased by 16 men of Middle Eastern descent. They’d all claimed on their rental application to be “physicians and religious students.” Their previous address had been a rooming house in Genoa. The national police suspected these men were terrorists and that the villa was rented as a staging point for their operations. Plus, something strange had happened in the Aegean Sea the night before that might be connected with all this.
    The Carabinieri higher-ups in Rome were going to move on this information very soon, Tino’s friend revealed. He suggested it was best that the police chief obey their order.
    “Questa non e una cosa da coinvolgeri,” his friend had told him. “This is nothing to get mixed up