Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  Gabriela followed him. They hadn’t gone more than ten feet before they came to a man thrashing and bleeding on the sidewalk. He was clutching his belly and making noises human ears weren’t meant to hear for long. The man who’d grabbed Gabriela pulled his torn clothes aside and examined the wound in his flank. “You have a handkerchief?” he barked.

  “I…may.” Fumbling in her purse hurt Gabriela’s hands, but she was damned if she’d show it. She gave the Israeli a square of blue felted cloth—not a hankie, but what she used to clean her glasses.

  With a grunt, he wadded it up and stuffed it into the wound. His own handkerchief followed it a moment later. “Gotta slow down the bleeding,” he said.

  “I suppose so.” Gabriela’s stomach lurched. She didn’t want to give back the fuul beans, but she wasn’t sure she could keep them down.

  “Americans. You aren’t used to this.” Scorn edged the Israeli’s voice.

  “I’m a journalist. God help me, I’ve seen it before. I only wish I hadn’t,” Gabriela said. “Who do you think did…this?”

  “Arabs, of course,” the man said coldly. “ISIS? Hezbollah? Hamas? You know what? I don’t care. Whoever it is, we’ll make them sorry. You hit us, you get hit back harder.” A certain cold, fierce anticipation filled his voice.

  What happened to Turn the other cheek? Gabriela wondered. But Jesus had given that admonition a long time ago. Hardly anyone listened to Him then. No one in the Middle East gave a damn about Him now.

  The Israeli hopped up and stopped an ambulance by jumping in front of it and daring it to run him over. Gabriela thought of the Chinese man holding back tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The ambulance driver yelled furiously. The Israeli yelled back and pointed at the man he’d just plugged up. An attendant jumped out of the back of the ambulance. He had a pistol on his belt along with his aid kit. He and the fellow who’d dragooned Gabriela got the badly wounded man into the ambulance. It backed up, turned around, and squealed away.

  “Something,” the Israeli said, and then, “What’s your number?”

  She gaped at him. He stood there, smiling and confident, ready to tap it into his phone. Israeli men were sure they were God’s gift to women. No hesitation, no doubt—if it looked good to them, they went for it.

  No luck, either. “None of your damn business,” Gabriela snapped.

  The guy shrugged, not a bit put out. He’d swung, he’d missed, he’d swing again as soon as he could. “Your loss,” he said, and trotted toward the next closest injured person. That was a woman. Gabriela wondered if he’d come on to her while he was trying to patch her up. She wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.

  * * *

  —

  Brandon Nesbitt woke up in morning twilight. He was wide awake, too; the quarter of a roofie’d totally worn off. Should’ve taken half after all, he thought. He knew he’d be hammered by the time he finally got some sleep tonight.

  He dialed room service. A recorded message told him they’d go to work at 0630, half an hour from now. He said something foul. Food might wait, but he needed caffeine. A coffeemaker sat on the dresser. He went over to fix himself some brain cells in a cup.

  He was about to pour water into the reservoir when the floor shook under him and a roar filled the world. The windows rattled. He thought they’d blow in, but they didn’t—quite.

  Earthquake? No; he’d been through some. This was too big a boom to come and go that quick. Which left? Plane crash, he thought, then shook his head, remembering where he was. Car bomb! Goddamn big one, too!

  And we’re on the spot! He grabbed his phone and called Gabriela. He got her voicemail. “The fuck?” he muttered. Then he said, “Big bomb. Big story. Call me back!” Where the hell was she, anyway?

  Before he could put the phone down, it rang. Not Gabriela—Saul. “Come to my room—427,” the producer said when he answered. “You can see it from here. And how come Gabriela’s not answering?”

  “I dunno. I was wondering the same thing. But I’m on my way. Get the rest of the gang, too.” Brandon threw on jeans and New Balances. He didn’t bother with socks or with changing the old T-shirt he used for a pajama top.

  No elevators. Some kind of emergency stop. He ran down the hall and down two flights of stairs. No one complained about his getup. A nerdy diamond merchant in PJ’s had a companion who looked like a Victoria’s Secret model and dressed the part. Maybe they were a girl’s best friend. Brandon hurried past her, ran down the fourth-floor corridor, and banged on Saul’s door.

  Saul let him in, then pointed east, toward the center of town. “There.”

  “Jesus!” Brandon said. “That’s one fuck of a bomb.” He judged partly by the smoke rising above and behind a mall in the foreground, partly by the bite the explosion had taken from a medium-sized skyscraper. “What’s that building?” He didn’t know his way around Tel Aviv for hell. And Saul was a Jew. He ought to have this figured out.

  And he did. “It’s the new bus station they put up around the turn of the century.”

  Brandon grunted and nodded. “Makes sense if you’re a terrorist. Banks hold money. Bus stations hold people, and that’s what they’re after. But where’s Gabriela? It’s not like her to stay off the phone.”

  Saul only shrugged. “I dunno. I had the hotel operator ring her room phone. Zilch there, too.”

  “Damn!” If she can’t do the story, it’s mine, Brandon thought. He stared out the window at the smoke. Not much wind; the cloud hung above where the bomb had gone off. Faintly, through the glass, he heard siren after siren scream. More thuds against the door startled him. Then he relaxed—he’d told Saul to get the rest of the crew. The producer let them in.

  “Turn on the TV!” Brandon exclaimed.

  “What for?” somebody said. “It’s right in front of us.”

  “I want to find out what’s going on,” Brandon said with more patience than he felt. “The locals can tell us. And I want to see if the world press is in town. We may have a beat. It’s not what we came to cover, but we sure can.”

  “Where’s Gabriela?” two guys asked at the same time.

  “We don’t know. All we know is, she’s not picking up,” Saul said.

  When Brandon punched the remote, he found the locals were already at the site, gabbling in Hebrew. Things looked like hell, or slightly worse. Big chunks of the bus station had fallen in, or maybe gone up in smoke. Another building close by had taken a bad hit, too. Bodies and body parts lay in the street. The Israelis didn’t blur them the way American TV would have. Dazed, bleeding survivors staggered around. People were screeching. Cars blazed like tiki torches.

  “Anybody understand any of what’s going on?” Brandon asked.

  “Believed to be a van…” a cameraman said. Brandon hadn’t known Danny was Jewish—he was a freckled redhead. “Believed to have two men in it…Hundreds trapped in the wreckage.”

  “Arabs?” Brandon asked. “The perps, I mean.”

  Danny waved for him to quiet down. “When you talk, I can’t follow. Somebody’s calling for people to go to hospitals and give…something.”

  “Blood.” Brandon and three others said it together. Brandon went on, “Let’s get ready to roll. What we look like doesn’t mean shit right now. CNN, eat your heart out.”

  An Israeli with a look only too familiar—the kind of top firefighter or cop who took charge in disasters—snatched the mike out of a reporter’s hands. He shouted into it with desperate urgency.

  “Oh, Lord!” Danny went white—or maybe green.

  “What?” Saul wanted to get clued in.

  “He said something about radiation. I wish I knew the language better.”

  “Dirty bomb!” Brandon got it out first. People had dreaded one for years. Someday, they’d said. Well, it looked as if someday was here. And, with Gabriela silent, he was Joh
nny on the spot. “Come on!” he said, his voice crackling. “We’ll get as close as they let us.”

  Half the people crowding Saul Buchbinder’s room looked at him as if he’d gone nuts. “What if that’s too close?” a cameraman said. “I don’t want to glow in the dark.”

  Saul came through. “Double hazardous-duty pay,” he said.

  “Snag gas masks if you want,” Brandon added. “A country like this, the hotel’ll have some. And get cracking, okay? Nobody’s gonna go anywhere I don’t. Who’s game?”

  In twelve minutes, the whole crew was rolling toward the disaster. Sure as hell, the Israelis were trying to put a perimeter around the bombing, and a wide one, too. Well, with radiation involved you could understand that. But Brandon browbeat one set of cops into letting them go through, and Saul bribed another. Brandon thought so, anyway—no suddenly turned into okay, and the producer looked smug.

  They set up right at the ragged edge of catastrophe. Somebody handed Brandon a gas mask. Clumsily, he put it on. The light under the camera lens went red. Gas mask or not, he was on. “This is Brandon Nesbitt, in the bleeding heart of dirty-bombed Tel Aviv!” he said, and hoped his voice would get out.

  * * *

  —

  Eric Katz thought he’d got numbed to disasters. Suicide bombers, mass murderers, zealots flying planes into skyscrapers, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes…The world had taken some tough knocks lately, and he’d seen most of them.

  Now this new one. Israel had seen its fair share and more, but this felt different. This felt worse. The crowd in the little Jerusalem café sat silent, staring at the TV. You couldn’t hear yourself think here most of the time, but events had outrun arguments about them.

  Somehow, an American reporter was in the middle of the blast zone. “This is Brandon Nesbitt, in the bleeding heart of dirty-bombed Tel Aviv!” he exclaimed, his pig-snouted gas mask muffling some—but only some—of his excitement. There was a Hebrew voiceover for anyone who needed it, but Eric could get the English through it.

  He and Orly were as stunned as everyone else in the café. The look on her face scared him. He’d been shellshocked after 9/11, but he was a continent away from New York City. Tel Aviv lay next door to Jerusalem. Everything in Israel lay next door to everything else. This wasn’t a country, it was a family—one that had just had somebody murdered.

  “Brandon Nesbitt, live from Tel Aviv!” the reporter repeated. The name rang a vague bell for Eric. Hadn’t Nesbitt lost a job somewhere because of something unsavory? The details wouldn’t come. The day felt too weird. Disasters were like that. 9/11, for older people the day JFK got shot…As Nesbitt had said, a whole city got its heart ripped out today.

  “An hour ago, two—the authorities think two—men exploded a van outside the new bus station here in Tel Aviv,” Brandon Nesbitt said. “I hurried to the scene, or as close as I could get.”

  “Why was he there? Did he know ahead of time?” The ferocity in Orly’s voice made the hair on the back of Eric’s neck try to stand up. It was scarier than her eyes, which was saying something.

  He thought she was paranoid. Then Nesbitt said, “With me is my colleague and friend, Gabriela Sandoval, who was slightly injured in the blast. Tell people how you happened to get caught in it, Gabriela.” Eric started wondering about conspiracy theories himself. Wasn’t that too pat?

  Ms. Sandoval also wore a gas mask. Her hands were bandaged; blood splashed her top. “You’ll know, but the world won’t, that Gabriela and Brandon came to Israel to cover the red heifer and the possible rebuilding of the Temple,” she said. Orly snorted softly. A few people in the café jeered, but only a few. Disaster even trumped woo-woo. Gabriela Sandoval went on, “I had an early breakfast at the bus station, and I was on my way back to our hotel when the bomb went off. I did what I could to help hurt people till I saw you and the crew. That was when I found out it was a dirty bomb.” One of her battered hands went to the gas mask.

  “We were stopped from getting within half a mile of the station by Israeli security personnel,” Brandon said. “They’d already started cordoning off the area. Here is Captain Mordechai Yehoshua. Captain, why did you suspect this was something worse than an ordinary explosion?”

  Yehoshua didn’t bother with a mask. He was filthy and blood-spattered. He’d got a lot closer than half a mile. “We brought Geiger counters. We always fear the possibility,” he said, his English accented but more precise than that of many native speakers. “We fear it, and now we have it. What the people who did this will have…” He shook his head. “It is not for me to say.”

  Fuul beans, bread, and cups of espresso sat forgotten in front of Eric and Orly. Hardly anyone in the café was eating much. How could you, after this?

  “Do you know what the radioactive substance is?” Brandon asked.

  “Not yet,” Yehoshua answered. “We will soon. The explosion spread it wider than we would have liked. The wind, thank God, is calm, or it would have gone farther yet.”

  “How wide an area is contaminated?” Gabriela Sandoval inquired, and then, “How radioactive are you, Captain?”

  “Me?” The Israeli looked surprised. “I haven’t had time to worry about me. How wide an area? We’re finding out.” He eyed the American reporters. “You are likely inside it here. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Chance we take.” That was Nesbitt, brave, foolhardy, or sure he lived a charmed life. Eric thought Gabriela was older, though with the masks he couldn’t be sure. She made no blithe comments, anyway. Eric would have got the hell out himself. Nesbitt went on, “Is there any estimate of casualties?”

  “Not yet. With a bus station, with people going in and out, it’s hard to say,” Yehoshua replied. “Dead will be close to four figures, if not in them. This is from the explosion, you understand. The radiation…I have no idea.”

  “Has anyone claimed responsibility?”

  “Not that I know of,” Yehoshua said. “There are obvious candidates, though. They should think twice before they celebrate. Our reach is long, and they will pay. Oh, yes.” His voice sounded even scarier than Orly’s.

  “Every Ahmed in the world better run,” said a man with hairy ears two tables over from the archaeologists. Certain kinds of Israelis called all Arabs Ahmeds, the way some Americans in MAGA caps called all blacks Rastuses. People nodded and shushed the man with the hairy ears at the same time. But chances were he wasn’t wrong.

  Somebody handed Brandon Nesbitt a note. He glanced down at it through the mask’s portholes or whatever their right name was. “The Security Minister has resigned. The Prime Minister has accepted the resignation,” he said.

  “That mamzer better run, too,” said the man with the ears. “Screw up like this and quitting isn’t good enough.”

  “Whole government should resign,” someone else said. “They let us down.”

  “Everybody did, everybody in the world,” the hairy-eared man agreed. “And now? Now it’s payback time.”

  Click. Click. Click, click. Yitzhak Avigad was no expert on Geiger counters. He hadn’t known Kibbutz Nair Tamid owned one. He wished he still didn’t. That would mean nobody’d had to pull it out of storage.

  “Come on!” He shouted as loud as he could through his gas mask. Almost everybody wore one. Yitzhak wished they had a mask for Rosie. Wish for the moon, he thought. Two men led her in from the fields toward a horse trailer hitched to a Toyota pickup.

  “Hose her down!” Yitzhak yelled.

  Somebody had already turned on a hose. Rosie snorted in surprise and what sounded like pleasure. The day was warm. The water probably felt good. But that wasn’t why Yitzhak gave the order. If anything radioactive had landed on the red heifer, he wanted to wash it off.

  He glanced west, toward Tel Aviv. The dirt on the portholes wasn’t the only thing blurring his vision. So did tears of mourning and fury, and the smoke pa
ll hanging over the city.

  There were moments you always feared. When you found yourself in one of them, you commonly discovered it was as bad as you’d thought it would be.

  This nightmare moment was worse. Not just a truck bomb but a dirty bomb! The dead, the maimed, the wreckage—and who could say when people’d be able to go back into downtown Tel Aviv? Even after the experts declared it safe, how many ordinary people would believe them? How many tourists would?

  It was worse than a disaster. What could be worse than a disaster? A catastrophe, and this was one.

  “Get her into the trailer,” Yitzhak told Rosie’s handlers. Dripping, the cow went up the ramp. She was a good-natured beast. They’d put feed in the manger inside the trailer. Rosie’d started eating when the men locked the gate behind her.

  “Uncle Yitzhak!” Chaim called from the closest building. They’d have to get him and the other ritually pure kids out, too. That would be more complicated than moving Rosie. Plenty of kibbutzim could care for a cow. Keeping the boys ritually pure till she was sacrificed…They had to do it.

  “What?” Yitzhak asked.

  “Come see what’s on Al Jazeera!”

  Yitzhak said something foul. But he came. Word about the dirty bomb was all over the world. That crazy American who wanted to do a story about the red heifer and Chaim ended up in the right place at the right time—unless he ended up dead of radiation poisoning, anyhow.

  What would the Arab satellite channel’s take be? Yitzhak remembered men in kaffiyehs and women in hijabs dancing in the streets of Palestine after 9/11. He remembered how fast the Palestinians suppressed those pictures after they realized—too late—they weren’t winning friends but were influencing people. Surely they wouldn’t…

  But they would. There was a cheering crowd in Hebron. “Death to Israel!” people chanted. “Death to America!” others cried. Yitzhak spoke fluent Arabic. A scraggly-bearded kid struck his face in the camera and screamed, “An Arab A-bomb! Allahu akbar!”