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A piece of advice in case you ever find yourself on top of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City—watch out for the cross at the very top of the spire. It is a hell of a lot sharper than you'd think.

The roof tiles are pretty slippery, too, particularly the ones with the pigeon shit on them.

On the other hand, the view is to die for. Especially if you're up there with a maniac who's waving a Beretta Model 12S 9mm submachine gun in your face.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: That Beretta's a great gun, but the frame tends to crack under the weight of too many hot rounds. The maniac would have been much better off with an H&K MP5; a lot less chance of a misfire.

I would have pointed this out myself, but he didn't seem in the mood for constructive criticism. He had a shitass grin on his face, the sort that says, "Eat lead and die, Marcinko."

The tips of my fingers started to sweat. They say the dome over St. Peter's is the biggest in the world, but at that moment it felt extremely small. When he swung the business end of the 12S toward me, it felt absolutely claustrophobic.

My own weapon lay on the roof below, out of ammo. It looked like I had two options—throw myself at him in the vain hope of somehow wrestling the gun from his paws before he managed to kill me, or…

I couldn't think of an or, actually.

But maybe I should explain how I came to be in such an exalted position in the first place. It's not every day that you get a private tour of the most famous rooftop in Christendom. And what got me out into the Roman sunshine wasn't your typical goatfuck… it was a truly artistic one, the sort of thing that would have made Michelangelo proud. So let's go back to the beginning….

This particular adventure began with a fax that arrived at Rogue Manor on Christmas Eve a few months before. The sheet was blank except for a Web address in the middle of the page. It was a bit past 10 p.m., and Rogue Manor was empty except for yours truly. With nothing else to do but await the arrival of Ol' St. Nick, I turned on the computer and typed in the address, which mostly consisted of numbers and backslashes. I vaguely recall thinking I'd see a picture of Santa and one of his elves in a compromising position. Instead, I found myself looking at a page filled with type so small I had to hit the magnifier button three times. It turned out to be a turgid dissertation on the coming end of the "Crusader Epoch," the inevitable clash of "a great civilization with a decript [sic] one," and the unstoppable rise of the True People of the Book. Clement Moore, or whoever wrote "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," has nothing to worry about.

We get tons of emails, faxes, and letters from whacko crazies at Rogue Manor, and this one probably would have faded into the hazy recesses of my mental round file except for the signature at the bottom of the Web page. The "communiqué of fervor" had been signed with the name "Saladin."

In case obscure, failed world leaders doesn't happen to be your favorite Jeopardy! category, here's a quick info dump on Saladin: Also known as Salah al-Din and a half-dozen similar variations, Saladin was a twelfth-century Egyptian warrior who took Jerusalem from the crusaders. He built the wall that surrounds the old city and was the first pan-Arab to try to consolidate all Arab people under the green banner of Muhammad. He failed—not for want of trying or low body count—but has remained a source of inspiration ever since. Many an Arab leader has used him as a role model, reinterpreting history and the legend through his own distorted glasses. Nasser, Saddam Hussein, even the Shah of Iran viewed him as an inspiration. Osama bite-my-butt Laden didn't use the name, but it isn't hard to see parallels between his aims and Saladin's goal of a pan-Arab empire.

Over the years I've had various encounters with would-be Saladins, some of whom were actually credible opponents. Probably the most notable was in Cairo during the 1990s. I won't bore you with more backstory than necessary here; suffice to say that the name piqued my interest. The Web page was on a site that belonged to an international drug company. Clearly, it had been hacked into. When my computer guy checked with the firm the day after Christmas, they expressed complete surprise.

At least that's how he interpreted the words, "Holy shitfuck—what the hell is this?"

(My self-anointed "computer dude" and all-around tech expert is a tech-head wop dweeb named Paul Guido Falcone, a wiseass known to us as "Shunt." Shunt has shunts in his head. They're some sort of metal inserts placed into his skull because he was born with water in his skull; I think of them as brain gutters. He's loads of fun with metal detectors.)

A few days later, another fax arrived with a new Web address. Here was posted a new dissertation repeating the main points of the first—history was on the side of the schizophrenics, etc. It concluded by making some predictions: A new leader would arise to knit together the worldwide network of murdering assholes, and his name was—guess now—Saladin.

And by the way, as a display of the new leader's power, a small incident would occur the next day as a signal to the brothers of faith and insanity that the time for war would begin.

The time was given as 00:00:01, but no place was specified. Even though it was an open-ended and nonspecific threat, I reported it anyway, filing the information with both Homeland Security and the CIA (also known as the Christians In Action). I also forwarded a bunch of heads-ups to a number of friends and acquaintances in the terrorist threat business, figuring one more wild-goose chase would just make the holiday season that much more enjoyable.

At roughly the same time I was burning up the phone lines, a fax similar to mine arrived at al-Jazeera, the mouthpiece long favored by crazies and psychos wrapping themselves in the word of Muhammad, blessed be his name. The fax was turned over to the reporter in charge of whacko ramblings, who dutifully plugged the address into his browser and began reading Saladin's communiqué, which in this case was written in Arabic. While most of the rant was familiar—war of civilizations, death to the crusaders, etc.—this one contained more specific predictions relating to mayhem, promising uprisings across the globe, especially in that holy wasteland known as Afghanistan. It also mentioned that a certain liquefied gas ship on its way from Malaysia to a new port in China would be blown up to start the new millennium of Allah's Paradise. Once more the time was given as 00:00:01.

The reporter considered the matter, then decided to report it, only to find that the ship had been blown up. He subsequently determined that the time of the explosion was correct or at least close enough to count—assuming your watch was set to the time in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, arguably the center of the worldly universe if you're Muslim. The reporter wrote a story, and for maybe twenty-four hours the world's intelligence agencies spent considerable resources trying to profile Saladin. I received not one, not two, but three separate calls from analysts at the Christians In Action about Saladin, the Web pages, and the faxes. I told them everything I knew, which wasn't much. The NSA—"No Such Agency," the ultrasecret eavesdropping and electronic snoops over at Fort Meade—did a frantic search through its archives to see what it had snooped out on Saladin without knowing who he was. The Chinese loaded a group of special agents aboard a destroyer and shipped them over to interview the survivors. Forensics specialists from six or seven countries flew out to the wreckage, most of which was at the bottom of the Pacific and out of reach.

Copyright © 2006 by Richard Marcinko.