by Greg Bear
And the man with one blue eye and one green eye, with dirty hair and bloody face, vanished under its hood and tires. The bus did not even slow. Three more cars rolled over the tumbling pile of meat and rags, lurching on their shocks like kiddy bumper toys.
‘Suspect is down,’ Dalrymple said.
‘He’s gone,’ Periglas said.
Jane closed her eyes. For some reason, no time to guess why, former Special Agent Winter had been cut loose to wander and die.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
Mina
Through the open window of the minibus, William felt the wind shift. In a few minutes, it might be just right for an opening salvo of fireworks. He scanned the gray skies. Al-Husseini was driving over the hard-packed dirt trail, not really a road. The minibus was bucking and complaining like a donkey. They were all listening to Dalrymple explain what had just been seen on the overpass.
‘Was it Winter?’ Rebecca asked.
‘We think so,’ Jane said. ‘We’ll replay—’
‘No time,’ Fouad said. ‘What else do you have for us?’
‘Agent Rowland has picked up one of our settlers,’ Dalrymple said.
‘He’s on a cell with his fiancée in Jerusalem,’ Jane said. ‘According to our translator, he’s sitting in the back of a truck and he’s not a happy terrorist. Something about having diarrhea.’
‘Let me hear his voice, if he is still talking,’ Fouad said. ‘I need to hear this man who wants to kill so many Muslims.’
Dillinger interrupted from Washington, DC. ‘Mr. Al-Husseini, we show you coming up on a gated service road outside the tent city.’
‘Yes, as I have told you,’ Al-Husseini said. ‘The gates will be open. I know the guards. That is your point of entry. Papers will be checked. I assume—’
‘Fouad, on short acquaintance, do you trust Mr. Al-Husseini?’ Dillinger asked.
The two men in the front of the minibus exchanged dark glances. Fouad looked away and grinned. ‘He is an individual with many fine traits,’ he said. ‘What more can I say?’
Al-Husseini smirked. ‘We are all excellent individuals.’
The gate was simple but effective, an opening cut through long straight kilometers of chain link fencing that had been coiled back and staked down. Five armed men in black berets and olive-green uniforms, trim and professional, stood around a sand-colored military truck open to the early dawn light. They waved their automatic weapons and Al-Husseini pulled to the left and stopped.
Fouad leaned over to listen to the conversation. Al-Husseini spoke rapidly and softly to a thin man with a full black beard. A packet of money was exchanged. The thin man riffled through the bills, then waved the barrel of his gun.
‘He will not need to check our papers,’ Al-Husseini informed them. ‘I used to be his superior officer. He works now for the provisionals—for Iraqis and Yemenis, so I hear. A true pig among pigs, just like me.’
‘We’ve lost the settler’s cell signal,’ Jane said. ‘We think they were still in Mecca, however. They haven’t moved out to Mina.’
‘There will be time,’ Fouad said. ‘The pilgrims are going to Arafat. They’ll return to Mina after sunset.’
‘We should park and drink bottled water,’ Al-Husseini said. ‘Patience is all.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Arafat, Mina
Having prayed at the Mount of Mercy, where Adam and Eve had found each other after being expelled from Paradise, and where Mohammed (peace be upon him) had delivered his final sermon, pilgrims flowed back toward Mina. Three stone and masonry pillars representing all the temptations of the devil lay in a straight line within the confines of a huge twostory structure that could provide access to thousands at once—yet still, this was the most dangerous moment of the Hajj. Pilgrims, exalted and exhausted from their prayer vigil at the Mount of Mercy, having searched deep within their hearts, having confronted their darkest selves and found God’s mercy and forgiveness, had departed at sunset toward Muzdalifa to gather their forty-nine pebbles, then stumbled and stalked toward their final task in such numbers that the crush, even in good times, times of order and control, had left dozens and even hundreds dead. Now there was little or no control. Soldiers and would-be police kept back, standing in groups or sitting on their cars or trucks, rifles slung or raised to the dark sky, dark eyes watching with helpless bemusement. They were surrounded by a sea of human beings clad in towels or long, modest dresses, moving in one direction and with one intention: to rid themselves of the last vestiges of evil and complete their Hajj.
Fouad had instructed Al-Husseini to pull over to the side of the road just north of the King Khalid Overpass. The wind was blowing gently from the southeast. Thousands of cars, trucks, and buses swarmed out of Arafat along all the available roadways, chugging all manner of exhaust fumes. Cook stoves gasped plumes of oily smoke that coalesced into a ragged blanket over Mina, and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of sacrificial sheep—already underway—added an invisible tang of blood.
The OSMOs were overwhelmed.
Fouad listened to the irritated chatter of security frequencies. All was confusion, even in the electronic caverns of the Navy ship sailing off the coast, but he was still in contact with most of his team.
They might as well be blind. Within the hour, Fouad was sure, the settlers would launch their fireworks. From the minibus, they would look up to see the starbursts and know they had failed. They would share in the fate of all the faithful passing below them.
Yet God was merciful.
William sat by a middle window, scanning the hordes and the traffic. Rebecca sat in the seat opposite, communicating directly with Jane Rowland on the Heinlein. They had not recovered the settler’s phone signal. Someone in Mecca was jamming across a wide spread of frequencies. The jamming could be penetrated but it would take time.
‘They’re on to something,’ Amir told Fouad as they listened. ‘Someone high up thinks there’s going to be trouble.’
‘If there’s anybody actually in charge,’ Mahmud added. ‘Doesn’t look very organized.’
Fouad stared at Al-Husseini’s neck and head above the back of the driver’s seat. ‘It is time to join the pilgrims on foot,’ Fouad said. They were wearing nondescript khakis. Amir pulled black berets from a duffel bag, complete with red and green chevrons, silver pins, and enameled Hajj security medallions. He handed around the insignia, authentic enough to pass at least an amateur inspection.
They finished quickly. Pilgrims overflowing onto the overpass peered through the minibus windows with sleepy curiosity. Al-Husseini glared back. ‘This is not a good place to begin a search, if you are on foot,’ he announced. Without warning, he started the bus and honking madly, with little regard for the crowd, he rejoined the flow of vehicles in the center lanes.
Their pace was still agonizingly slow. The entire world moved like thick jam. Outside, the temperature was already ninety-three degrees. The sun burned like a torch and a hot puff through the open windows instantly dried their sweatdamp hair.
Captain Periglas peered over Jane’s shoulder. ‘We must have fifteen thousand midges out there,’ he said. ‘Close-up and personal isn’t working. We have a UAV at altitude taking some synthetic aperture radar scans—SAR. Let’s get clever. We’ll shoot ten or twenty high-rez radar images of the entire town, then use our visual search engine to locate every truck in the area above a certain size. That’ll narrow it down a little.’
‘Might work,’ Dalrymple said when the captain had moved to another section of the TSC. ‘We’re pretty good at pickin’ fleas from black sand.’
Jane was still searching for the phone signal when Dalrymple switched their gog displays to a fresh SAR scan of Mina. Combined with earlier scans from several angles, resolution was down to twenty centimeters. The ship’s computers almost instantly drew more than a thousand red circles on the densely detailed false-color image. Jane focused on the grid defined by the King Abdul Aziz Overpass, then the road of the s
ame name—just a few hundred yards from the boundary that defined Mina to pilgrims—and the King Khalid Overpass.
A fire had started just east of the Mina Mosque. The hotspot and plume of smoke was clearly visible as she switched between an infrared image and the SAR composite. The next IR image came in five minutes later and revealed that the fire had almost doubled in size and more fires had sprung up throughout the tent camp, some creeping to the vicinity of the Al Malim Mosque.
Supposedly the tents were fireproofed.
Something was going very wrong down there.
‘Let’s track any vehicle longer than ten meters,’ the captain said. That reduced the number of circles down to a few hundred. ‘Now compare with the latest scan and see how many of them are moving and how fast.’
Twenty-five were on the move. Most were crawling along in the general syrup of humanity and traffic.
‘Get me a sat microwave contour of the same region. Let’s see who’s trying to break through the jamming.’
‘Watch this,’ Dalrymple said to Jane.
The display colors abruptly changed to red and green. Purple smudges of radiated microwave energy—minus the normal background for warm objects—spread quickly, combined, threatened to dominate, and then fixed—a huge bouquet covering nearly all of Mina. The computers selected for intensity, reducing the smudges to dots, then cross-referenced with the truck positions and attached five dots to moving vehicles longer than ten meters.
‘Let’s get some sharp-eyed midges on those trucks,’ the captain ordered.
‘So much for OSMOs,’ Jane commented.
‘It’s that damned slaughterhouse,’ Dalrymple said. ‘We didn’t take that into account. Too much blood and stuff in the air. And there’s a lot of smoke. Jesus, look at the fires.’
‘What’s causing them?’ Jane asked.
‘Not a clue,’ Dalrymple said.
Periglas leaned over Jane’s shoulder again. He pointed to the northernmost expanse of the tents, tens of thousands of them. Jane zoomed in on the latest optical scan until she found herself staring down at blocky images of men with guns—soldiers? Security?—marching in groups of ten or twenty between rows of closely spaced tents, followed by light armored vehicles.
‘They’re searching for somebody or something, and they don’t seem to care what they torch or who they kill,’ Periglas said.
Jane relayed this immediately to Rebecca.
‘We can see them,’ Rebecca said. ‘They’re not regulars—they’re wearing khakis, robes, business suits—carrying every sort of weapon imaginable—we can’t tell what the hell authority they’re working under.’
She turned to William, then to Fouad. Both were sitting on the right side of the minibus, toward the front, keeping an eye on a nearby band of gunmen paralleling their course. Amir and Mahmud took the rear, facing forward, their own guns held low so as not to attract attention. Al-Husseini wasn’t able to drive much faster than the armed men could walk.
‘Hold on,’ William said.
‘Fighting ahead,’ Al-Husseini called over his shoulder. ‘There is a roadblock.’
Bullets pinged off the masonry of a building to their left. This caused the armed men on their right to return fire—in all directions. The minibus came to an abrupt halt and Al-Husseini turned off the engine. The windows on the right side shattered. Grange crouched and frog-marched behind a seat. Rebecca was already flat on the ridged rubber matting that ran down the aisle. William crawled forward just in time to grab at Al-Husseini. With Fouad, he tried to keep the man from pushing the door open and fleeing. They struggled as more shots blew out the windshield and the remaining windows on their left. Bullets flew from all around. Men and women in the streets were shrieking.
‘We must go!’ Al-Husseini pleaded. ‘They are brigands. They are here to disrupt the Hajj. We have guns—we must fight them!’
Fouad pushed him between two seats and he and William hemmed in the Saudi with their bodies. William twisted to stare down the aisle at Rebecca. More fire raked the roof, tearing up the liner and blowing out air conditioner vents. Pieces of plastic rained down.
Rebecca brushed away pebbles of glass and shouted forward, ‘Fouad, what can you see?’
Jane clearly heard the nightmare outside the minibus. Dalrymple icily worked through his displays as Periglas spoke with Grange about the locations of the rest of Fouad’s team. She didn’t seem to have anything to do. With half-numb fingers, she resumed what she had been doing earlier—this time using the pinpoint locations of the five trucks they had tracked with the IR and SAR images. She demanded and received access to a high-altitude vehicle and narrowed the UAV and satellite sensors, breaking through the jamming just long enough to catch a burst of Hebrew, or what sounded like Hebrew, she couldn’t be sure until the female translator in the United States spoke up.
‘You have Yigal again,’ the translator said. ‘He’s arguing with somebody. They can’t communicate with the other trucks.’
Rebecca broke in. ‘There’s a truck up ahead. It can’t be one of the trucks we’re looking for. It’s a flatbed, no cargo—but it’s being stormed by a mob of armed men. The militia is concentrating fire on the truck and its driver.’
Grange spoke breathlessly from the minibus. ‘I think we’ve been compromised. They may be looking for the same trucks we’re looking for—’
The jamming became more intense and all the digital signals from the Meccan team dropped out.
‘That’s it,’ Dalrymple said. ‘Too much interference. Provisionals are pumping noise all over the valley.’
‘Somebody doesn’t trust us to get the job done,’ Periglas observed dryly.
Jane stared helplessly at the UAV video feeds of Mina, the mountains, and Mecca itself.
David Grange pinned Al-Husseini with his own body and asked the question that was on everyone’s mind.
‘You told them we were coming and why we’re here, didn’t you?’
Al-Husseini, sweating profusely, stared up at Grange and shook his head. ‘We should get out of here. They are shooting even pilgrims.’
‘Yes, but there’s method in their madness. They’re looking for trucks—just like us. They don’t know which trucks, so they’re going to stop and shoot up every truck they find. Shooting up trucks at random won’t solve anything. It could make things worse. You were not supposed to tell anyone.’
Al-Husseini grimaced at the pressure on his chest. The noise around the minibus had concentrated ahead of them, outside the blown-out windshield and beyond the makeshift barriers of overturned cars and battered steel drums. Roughlooking soldiers had come in from the side streets to gloat over the destruction. Fouad popped up to look ahead. The truck’s driver, from what he could see, had been cut in half and his head was missing. His truck tires were shot-out and smoking.
‘There’s nothing, he was riding empty,’ Fouad said. Amir and Mahmud had positioned themselves by the doors, guns ready, in case soldiers tried to board. So far, they were being ignored. The damage to the minibus had been collateral.
Grange placed his hands expertly on Al-Husseini’s neck. The unkempt Saudi’s eyes began to protrude, but he did not put up a fight—not yet. He could hardly move.
‘Let’s talk, man to man,’ Grange said. ‘We’re here to save the Hajj. Bottom line; that’s the truth. We told you as much. Did you or someone you worked with…’
‘Who would believe you?’ Al-Husseini said. ‘All Americans hate Muslims. You feed the soldiers who are rioting in Mecca and Mina, killing pilgrims. They are your soldiers. You want all of Saudi Arabia for America. Kill me, that won’t change things.’
Grange let go of his throat. ‘Fuck it. We’re compromised,’ he said.
Fouad leaned over Al-Husseini. ‘Is that true?’
Al-Husseini stared up at him with bloodshot eyes. ‘To die in Mecca is a blessing,’ he said.
‘To save Mecca…would that not be a greater blessing?’
Al-Husseini was remarkabl
y calm. ‘Jewish agents are in our city. You have brought infidels with you. It does not matter who eventually rules Mecca, you are not worthy of trust.’
Fouad rolled back and chuffed out his breath in disgust. ‘It is so,’ he murmured. ‘Who can deny it? But if we do not find these Jews, Mecca will die. That is also truth. It is not what we want, not what you want.’
Al-Husseini looked away.
‘Let’s hit the road,’ Grange said, eyes rolling. ‘Maybe Allah will guide us now.’
Rebecca tapped the side of her head. Jane Rowland was back in her ear. William and Fouad could hear her as well. Something was wrong with Grange’s earnode and gogs and he heard nothing.
‘—rerouting from low altitude. Still there, folks?’
‘I hear and obey, oh mighty one,’ Rebecca said. Then, to Al-Husseini and Grange, she added, ‘Allah appears to be female today. Sorry to disappoint, boys.’
‘We have a candidate vehicle,’ Jane said. ‘Five young men in a Volvo truck. They’re leaving the scene of some major fighting and they can’t talk to their other trucks. We’re setting up a connection now. Can you follow the street signs?’
Fouad had memorized a map of Mecca. ‘We can go wherever they are,’ he said. To Grange, he said, ‘The rest of you, leave the bus when it is clear.’ Amir and Mahmud looked distressed, but Fouad waved them on. ‘To die in Mecca is a blessing. We will all be together soon enough.’
Al-Husseini began to struggle. Amir and Mahmud helped Fouad restrain and gag him.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Fouad Al-Husam waited a few minutes for the others to make their way across the street and hide in the entries of nearby apartment buildings. He held his finger to his lips and inserted his thumb between the man’s cheek and the cloth gag.
‘I understand why you did what you did,’ he said softly. ‘No matter now that it was wrong. In your place, I might have done the same.’
Al-Husseini’s eyes were wild but Fouad stroked his matted, thinning hair with one hand. ‘I do not think anybody knows how we feel. You are like my father in many ways. If I take away your gag…will you be quiet?’