by James, Mark
“Never seen him before.”
“Well, he was shooting at you – sniper’s rounds. Most people tend to know who wants to kill them.”
Jack squinted, “Same answer.”
The young Arab leader walked around them, looking down as if at an enigma.
“Well, I happen to know him,” he finally said. “Or rather, of him. He has many faces, many names. Most call him, the Spaniard.”
The young man turned aggressive, moving up to Jack so that their eyes were a foot apart, challenging in the closed space.
“Who…are…you?” he said in perfect English, keeping his voice low and menacing, drawing out each word.
Jack studied the young leader, knowing that men in control don’t need to act as if they are. He noted the menacing tone, the pauses at the end of the words for effect. To Jack, this young man seemed…young, as if he’d been thrust into a position and needed to posture to show his strength. Which meant that all of the older leaders were dead.
He decided to go directly with Aisha’s words:
Remember when we knew nothing, only
the village, the well and the water…
He paused.
The well, the water, now gone into the
desert. We are the Wind…
And the last,
The Tears of Allah, the Greatest Wind,
are now in your eyes…
With each, the young man listened more intently, drawn in by the words, each a number on a tumbler slipping into place.
For himself, Jack thought that such words were simply the last gasps of a people fading back into history, a civilization left with only the desperate yelling at others and at others’ Gods.
“So, she’s alive…” the young man said. “How is she?”
He hesitated, remembering the older eyes behind him, “That she is alive, we knew this when the Des Moines theatre remained.”
“She’s safe,” Jack said. “No harm will come to her. You have my word.”
“Ah, your word, all of your endless words. The regurgitation of liars. A civilization of liars.”
He said it more for the men behind him. Jack ignored the taunt.
“She’s my friend, that’s it. She’s in a bad spot and I’ve helped her as much as I can. That’s all. She said you were someone who had the strength to see through things. She said you would help us.”
The young man peered down at them, smiling. “You are very good at this, Mr. O’Neill. Oh yes, we know who you are. Who doesn’t? You’re a wanted man, a wanted woman, your pathetic, decaying empire now turned against you.”
Jack stared at him. “She said you would help us, Anouar.”
The man squinted back, trying to see deeper.
“What do you want?” he finally said.
Jack explained the Croatian accounts, how it had been made to look like the cell was involved, that the cell had tried to pay for Aisha’s silence.
“We are not money grubbing Americans!” the young man erupted, the desperate leader finally coming out of him.
He steadied himself, “Aisha knew what she was doing. She knew that all things in this world have consequences. She knew this much.”
He walked up to them, slowly, like a mongoose to a snake. “You have said the words, the ones Aisha gave to you, and we have listened. Last chance: What-Do-You-Want?”
“The accounts. We need proof. We need the sum transactions over a two-week window. In order to show that none of the supposed payouts are there, that the account numbers don’t match up. We need that time window. I need the raw data.”
The young man heard truth in the American’s words. He walked over beneath the carving of St. Francis and looked up. The Christian church had battled the Romans and had ripped away from the past in order to chart a new course. In this singular fact, he respected these Christian heathens. There were centuries in those robes, in those carvings, of men, by men, much like he. What would they say? If he could hear them through the centuries, what would they tell him?
He turned sharply, “Get what he says.”
Behind him, a younger man amongst the older hesitated.
Khaled turned and stared at Jack. In that moment, Jack could see what death he had already seen, seared into his eyes.
Without another word, the man in the line turned and spoke to another, who walked through the pews and disappeared into the back.
Jack looked at Khaled, wondering what he might have been without all of this hate, without chasing a religion down the spiraling well of history. Did he even know that by clinging to a dead idea he was already dead? That he had fulfilled his own prophesy, without ever actually knowing it?
Jack held the stack of papers in his hand like a grail.
“Go now,” Khaled muttered. “Leave us.”
Jack squinted, intrigued, “Aren’t you worried that once we leave here you’ll all be targeted? That’s something I’d think about.”
“Yes, of course,” he said, smiling. “But you and your brothers will not catch us. These churches are laced with underground catacombs, tunnels for our escape.”
Jack and Lani could hear scuffling behind them, then hands reaching around and placing the chemical-laced clothes over their mouths, the world closing in again.
As the church began to swirl, Jack could see the wavering image of the young man, laughing.
“Think of it,” Khaled bellowed, turning to his comrades and holding his arms out, “we will walk to our freedom through the catacombs, past the Christian dead!”
The line of men cheered, raising their guns.
Khaled turned back to them and paused, as if he’d forgotten something. He walked over and leaned down, whispering in Jack’s ear, “Yes, we will make our escape through the ancient tunnels of the Christians, beneath their dead eyes. Irony, another Great Wind…”
†
“What time is it there?” President Walker asked.
“6:42 p.m.,” Mac said, leaning over the SID room console that was linked to the satellite. “Sundown is officially at 6:53.”
Walker looked over, “Give them more time?”
Mac shook his head, “I was clear – get out by 6:40, no later.”
One of the NSA analysts at a scope looked up, “We have them, sir!”
The analyst switched the satellite feed to the large monitor on the wall.
“Sirs, the satellite shows the car driving away, back from where it came. Not sure how they got there without us seeing them, but it’s them alright. We gained a positive ID as they ran from one of the buildings towards the car. No one else.”
Walker turned to General Hightower, issuing the order approving an incursion into Croatian airspace.
Twenty-three seconds later and a hundred miles off the Croatian coast, two stealth fighter jets lifted off from the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier. They carried CLEOPs-enabled warheads affixed to surface-to-air missiles. The Americans knew of the catacombs, having studied the underground imaging.
Johnny Lee, a twenty-five year old from Marietta, Georgia – his father a hardware store owner, his mother working at the local frame shop – issued the instructions to the plane’s computers, “Read: target G124.” There were no longer any buttons or switches on the plane’s control panel, a prototype for the F-80. All commands were by voice activation, the bio-engineers and neuro-psychologists hoping to soon have inter-link capability from the chip in Johnny Lee’s forehead to the plane’s computers.
The weapon silently released and fell through the clouds, down through the smoke.
Johnny Lee disengaged from the target and the jet fighter swept east. Out of a side window, he could see a mushroom cloud climbing behind him as if a volcanic eruption. On his console, a detached thermal image showed the same.
In the center of the town, the shredded buildings and melted glass imploded into a massive crater, as if into a black hole. The remaining fringe of the town circling the scar rested immune, detached: as if it had already died long ago.
In Russia and China, the computer consoles lit up, alerting their leaders to the sudden fireball in the middle of an irrelevant civil war.
Chinese Premier Xiong Deng Hu stared down the table at General Liu, pausing a final time as the others waited. The room was cavernous, ornate, part of a former palace. Reluctantly, he whispered, “Approved.”
There were no murmurs from the table, no returning whispers, no glances. They all knew what had been done. A sleeping dragon would now be awakened.
Deng Hu rose and began walking out. As he left, above the door was a carving, hundreds of years old, the words worn smooth.
The Winds of Destiny Seek Us All.
39
Jack and Lani stood atop the rough dunes that looked out over the Croatian coast. They’d driven through the night and past endless lines of refugees. She’d wanted to stop and Jack had stopped her. How do you save a thousand lives?
As they’d passed the endless faces, Lani had asked herself: What kind of God could make the Kauai clouds so utterly beautiful, yet allow this to happen, this senseless war, this endless suffering?
What could possibly be the purpose?
“I don’t see them yet,” Jack said. They’d kept Johannes’ binoculars and he held them up one more time, scanning the horizon. “Between dawn and seven-thirty, that was the window.”
After arriving at the coast in the predawn they’d waited in the car for the sun to rise. When it had come, the grayness of the clouds seemed to swallow up the light. Already seven o’clock, they’d been looking through the binoculars for the past two hours.
“Do we have the right time?” Lani asked as they started down the dunes to the beach. “They were supposed to wait, right?”
Jack remembered the captain’s pirate eyes and Engel’s words, “they’re far out of the game now, existing at the edges.”
Scavengers, Jack thought. Hit-and-run. No one was coming to pick them up.
They stood on the beach, looking out at the monotony of waves. No ship was in sight. No sign of anything.
Suddenly, a concussive wave struck them, blowing sand in their faces as a black, unmarked helicopter banked around the bluff and circled in.
The helicopter pitched down, its multiple strobe lights finding them as a wolf cornering prey.
Lani turned, stunned by the white-hot lights. She held her arms up against the sand. They’ve found us, she thought, they’ve finally found us...
Jack looked to the car at the top of the dunes, it feeling a hundred miles away. He shuffled through their options. They could run for it, hoping that the soldiers in the helicopter’s hold didn’t start shooting from the air, that once they were in the car that the helicopter would break off its pursuit, that it wasn’t equipped with machine guns or missiles. Even if they were able to get back to the car, they would still be left with only one choice: going back into the belly of a civil war. What would they do then?
They stared as a lone soldier dropped on a rope from the helicopter. Something wasn’t right. Why only one?
“Hold it!” Jack yelled as they were both about to run.
The soldier ran across the sand, a black alien creature weighed down with grenades and guns. He stopped ten feet from them, at the point where the sound from the helicopter fell off. Jack noticed that his black suit bore the bars of an Air Force Captain, also in black.
He raised his dark visor. Smiling, he yelled, “Mr. O’Neill, I’m under orders from Director Osborne. Please come with us.”
†
Jerry Taylor Jr. swatted at another fly and reached for his fourth 16 oz. beer that morning, three others crushed and littered beneath him, still others having rolled under his cinder-blocked trailer. Mississippi was hot, no doubt, even in winters, but not like this. Sweat poured from Jerry Jr. as he held the cold can up to his forehead. In front of his tattered lounge chair was his only TV set, sitting on a rusted oil drum and hooked up to a generator. The cicadas had been howling for five days and nights. He switched the channel.
“Hey, Bod!” he yelled back to his brother working in the shed, sharpening knives on a whetstone for their bunker, readying for the government take-over they were sure was still coming.
“What?” Bod muttered, sticking his head out, a knife dangling at his side.
“Check this out, boy!”
The news reporter from the Little Rock affiliate was trying to keep his balance on the windy tollway overpass and against the noise. He’d been stupid enough to insist upon wearing a suit and sweat ran down his back. “This is John Cavanaugh. I’m reporting from Interstate 40. As you can see, the whole city is on the move, the governor having called out the National Guard to aid in the exodus – cars overheating, people without water, some not having brought any with them. Right now, the commute is at four hours, building by the minute as people attempt to flee the noise. Some people have reported that they’ve barely slept in five days. Hospitals are reporting an alarming rate of psychosis related to sleep deprivation. The police…”
The yearly emergence of the cicadas had increased by a million-fold, spreading across the southern states. Entomologists had tracked the widening proliferation back to a point thirty miles east of Little Rock. They had no explanation, and none for why the cicadas had also started screaming through the night, nor why the insects had doubled in size this season. A million giant cicadas sounded like a thousand sirens and the people were at their wits end, now fleeing Arkansas with the mass exodus beginning to spread into Mississippi. FEMA was setting up temporary trailers in Tennessee, usually held back for the worst hurricanes.
“Jesus, look at all those stupid people!” Jerry Jr. howled. “For Christ’s sake, it’s just a bunch of bugs!”
Bod had already gone back into the shed, convinced that the noise was just one more sign of the coming Rapture, when all good Christians would be saved, when he would be saved, right after the government take-over.
Jerry Jr. turned to his favorite channel.
“Oh my God, Bod, you gotta hear this! That wench, Hillary, she finally kicked the bucket. For shit’s sake, she sure did drag it out.”
Jerry Jr. leaned forwards in glee. Apart from Ole Dixie finally rising, this was the best news he’d gotten in years.
“Hear this,” he said back to Bod, yelling over the cicadas and the whetstone, “they’re gonna give her a fuckin’ parade, the horse with boots turned around and all that. First a colored and then a woman. I hope my tax money ain’t goin’ for that damn parade! I’ve sure had my problems with that damn Walker, but at least he’s a man!”
Twelve hundred miles away, Jimmy Gardinelli Jr., a plumber by trade, was sitting down in his worn recliner in his New York rent-controlled apartment, his only two appointments having cancelled in the heat. His T-shirt was sweat-stained because last week he’d refused to pay the air conditioning man from the last heat wave. Jimmy had tried to call around, using his member-of-the-trade spiel, but the guy had gotten to all the A/C contractors first, spreading the word around. His wife, Ramona, was fit to be tied.
“Ramona!”
Ramona was in the kitchen, moving between getting Jimmy Jr. his next beer and flipping a burger on the stove. The heat was oppressive and she’d just reached for her iced tea.
“Coming…” she said, holding the glass to her forehead. She thought again about her sister coming into town for the weekend, wondering if the weekend would ever get there.
“It’s the big one, Ramona! You gotta see this!”
“What?” she said, coming around the corner into the living room, wiping the burger grease on her front.
Jimmy Jr. turned the volume up as the young reporter in San Francisco began to cry, unable to contain herself. She said that some people, the survivors, had reported a glow in the sky before the tremors began. A live feed from a news helicopter cut into the transmission, showing a broken world below: the city on fire, the stadium unrecognizable, the Golden Gate Bridge buckled and hanging in shatters.
�
�Holy shit…” Jimmy Jr. and Ramona muttered at once.
†
The C-88A military transport plane pitched wildly to the right, its enormous weight giving in to the gust. Lani held Jack’s hand tighter as they stared out of the plane’s windows, watching as the pilot attempted to bring the plane down again. They could hear the tires bounce, felt the jolt and then the screeching as the brakes grabbed hard.
Where were they? They’d descended through the clouds that had stayed thick almost to the ground, keeping them from locating a city or a marker. The tarmac to the airfield was empty, seemingly abandoned. In his last message, Mac had said, outside of Washington, D.C…don’t worry, we’ll get you home. Jack had told her that the U.S. government maintained bases and airfields that no one knew about, “off the map,” and she wondered if this was one of them.
After the helicopter had picked them up from the beach in Croatia, they were transported to a way station, where they cleaned up and were given fresh clothes. They counted three hours for that first flight from the way station to the first isolated airfield. They then re-boarded the empty plane and flew west, the clouds breaking as they left the Spanish coast and headed over the Atlantic. Halfway across the water, the clouds set in again.
The plane taxied to a hanger – sleek, modern and similarly empty. In front of the hanger was a black limousine, the windows blackened out.
A large man in a suit stepped out of the limo and turned. It was John Fitzgerald, the retired FBI Agent who’d helped them at the cottage.
He smiled widely, “Hey folks, how was that sunny Croatia? I’m your ride to the hotel – again. Curb-to-curb service! Welcome home!”
40
The president sat in the SID room with Mac to his left. Spread in front of them were files marked with the highest level security classification, one newly created by Walker and limited to an innermost circle. The only other person in the room was General Hightower, present as a witness. No one else had been invited or apprised of the meeting. They didn’t trust this conversation to anyone.