Phantom Strike

by William H. Lovejoy

  Nothing else happened.

  The man sat there for about five minutes.

  Then began to laugh.

  A little laugh at first, a smirk and giggle. Without effort, he was coming out of his depression.

  Then an uproarious laugh.

  He threw his shoulders back and his head snapped upright. His eyes appeared vivid.

  He shook his head violently.

  Laughing.

  His arms flailed about.

  He scratched his chest, his armpits, his crotch.

  Laughing.

  Insanely laughing.

  The screen went blank.

  “That went on for nearly forty minutes,” Salmi explained. “PD-86 completely disoriented him. On a larger scale, I think we could expect that a hostile force would act similarly, unable to mount a defence.”

  “What are the aftereffects?” Ramad asked.

  “We do not know. We took him out of his cell and shot him.”

  That was to be expected.

  Salmi nodded at Mufti.

  The captain started the video machine again. It was the same cell, Ramad supposed, but the prisoner was a different man, taller, thicker. And he was just as dejected as the first man. The stool was closer to the wall. He sat on the stool with his head leaning against the wall. Tears streamed down his face.

  “Toxin this time,” Salmi said.

  “The botulism?”

  “No, the Leader ruled that out, even though chemically based toxins do not create epidemics, as do the organically based compounds. The designation for this one is TR-11.”

  Ramad knew the nomenclature. This toxin acted similarly to a psychological agent, but created abject terror in those subjected to it.

  The base of the cell suddenly spurted white fog from half-a-dozen jets.

  The man noticed immediately, and his face turned up toward the camera. Ramad could see the pleading in his eyes.

  The fog roiled around his legs, rising.

  There was no sound, but Ramad saw the man’s mouth working. Please. Oh, Allah, please.

  He climbed up on the stool, attempting to stay above the fog.

  The fog began to disperse, a white haze filling the room so that the prisoner’s movements were difficult to follow.

  From the video, Ramad could tell the man was no longer begging God for mercy.

  He was screaming.

  His eyes rolled in their sockets.

  His body recoiled from nothing seen.

  He fell off the stool, knocking it across the cell. He immediately rose to his knees, slithered into the comer, backed into it.

  His balled-up fists struck out at something, anything, the wall. In minutes his knuckles were bloodied from striking the rough concrete walls.

  The screen went blank.

  “We waited forty minutes before shooting him,” Salmi said. “He never came out of his acute terror.”

  Ramad nodded his head affirmatively.

  “A consequence we had not considered,” Salmi said, “was that, in his terror, he was difficult to control.”

  “I can understand that,” Ramad said.

  “It will be interesting to see how al-Qati’s troops deal with three or four thousand people acting the same way.”

  Mufti started the video again.

  This would be the nerve agent. The final formula had been labelled GB31, and it was a derivative of Sarin, an older agent that was almost removed from the stockpiles of other nations. The newer version was non-persistent, precluding the necessity for decontaminating an area where it had been used.

  Again, the cell appeared on the screen, though it now contained a woman. She was a pretty woman, and she was naked, perhaps for the enjoyment of her jailers.

  She was afraid, ignoring the stool to curl against the far wall, holding her arms and hands in front of her.

  She was weeping, perhaps sadly, but quite definitely quietly.

  There was no visible release of the gas.

  The woman became aware that something was wrong with her, and she forgot her modesty.

  She leapt to her feet, her small breasts bobbing, her head rotating from side to side as she sought to find whatever it was that alarmed her.

  Ramad saw her cheeks twitching. A tic in one eye. Her arm jerked.

  “This attacks the nerve centres very quickly, Ibrahim. Muscle control is lost rapidly.”

  Her legs went out from under her, and she crashed to the floor.

  All of her limbs became spastic.

  Jerking, twisting, out of control.

  Her eyes were so large, the whites dominated. They seemed to spin. Her chest heaved as she fought to breathe.

  On her back now, her head slamming back and forth on the cement floor.

  “The brain is the last to go,” Colonel Salmi said. “It is aware throughout that something unfathomable is happening to the rest of the body. We judge the terror quotient to be extremely high, though there is little problem of control. The terror aspect is high for spectators, also.”

  Ramad did feel a little twitch or two deep in his guts, observing this ritual.

  Abruptly, she died.

  “Less than four minutes,” the air commander said. “It is very efficient.”

  Salmi was watching him closely, Ramad knew. This was as much a test of himself as it was an observation of results.

  “Very efficient,” Ramad agreed. His stomach still felt a little queasy, but that was because he was so close to the action.

  He knew the woman. She was a second cousin he had not seen in several years. He wondered what her crime had been.

  Perhaps simply that she knew him.

  “Do you still wish to proceed?” Salmi asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “With which agent?”

  “All three, I think, Colonel. It would be well to let our adversaries know the range of our choices.”

  Salmi smiled for the second time in years.

  Ten

  After the fifth and final simulated exercise, Ahmed al-Qati and his company commander, Captain Ibn Rahman, flew back to El Bardi to meet with the company commanders of his other three companies. They spent an afternoon planning continuing drills and approving requisitions for supplies. There were four disciplinary problems for the battalion commander to address, all of them involving men late for something — to work, to formation, back from leave.

  Neither al-Qati nor Rahman described what they were doing at Marada Air Base, though he was certain that the three commanders he had left behind at El Bardi were nearly overcome with curiosity. They did not know how fortunate they were, not knowing. Al-Qati himself, as soon as Ramad had revealed the plan, had gone into a shock that was difficult to conceal. For hours, his body had seemed removed from his mind. The mind was divided, normal functions occurring by rote on one side, and the other side desensitized, three or four steps removed from reality.

  He forced himself to attend to routine.

  Then al-Qati took a long bath, shaved, and patted the last of his last bottle of Aqua Velva over his face and neck. He dressed in a fresh uniform, commandeered a Volvo from the motor pool, and drove to Tobruk.

  He parked in front of the Seaside Hotel and went into the lobby to call Sophia’s room.

  “Ahmed! You are here!”

  “Only by a stroke of fortune, and only for tonight. I am inviting you to dinner. If you do not have other plans,” he added lamely.

  “But I am not hungry,” she said, “except for your company. If you would like to come to my room now, we will find dinner later?”

  He resisted the urge to skip his way across the lobby and up the stairs to her second-floor suite like some carefree youngster.

  She was waiting behind the partially opened door, peering through the crack at him as he advanced down the hall. When he reached her room, she pulled the door wide. Her smile was like the radiant beam of searchlights.

  Her hair was piled high and wrapped with a towel, as if she had just emerged f
rom her bath. She was wearing… what was it?… a peignoir. Her full breasts thrust at the loose, almost sheer fabric, and he found the effect nearly as exciting as her total nudity.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said.

  “Come to me, Ahmed.”

  She wrapped her arms around his waist, and drew him tightly to her. Leaning back to look up at his face, she raised up on her toes to kiss him.

  “I missed you.”

  “And I you,” he confessed.

  “Are you really hungry?”

  “My appetite seems to have vanished.”

  She reached behind him, to push the door shut, then led him toward her bed.

  They made love, intense and perhaps a bit ineptly, for nearly an hour, then went downstairs for a dinner that became rushed toward the end of the entree. He was aware of the flush that climbed up her throat and spread over her cheeks. He was rattled enough that he could not even remember what entree he had ordered and consumed.

  Al-Qati paid the bill, over tipping the effusive waiter, and they hurried back to her room and spent a leisurely two hours satisfying themselves yet again.

  In the early hours of the morning, with the French doors to the balcony flung wide and the lazy circles of the overhead fan creating a wispy breeze that cooled his flesh, Ahmed al-Qati decided he was very much in love.

  He told her so.

  “I am glad to hear you say it, my darling, for I wanted you to be the first to speak. I, too, love you.”

  Al-Qati sighed deeply, as lazy and content as he had been in years.

  “I worry about our future,” Sophia told him.

  “What? What is there to worry about?”

  “My husband, my almost ex-husband, can be expected to be vindictive.”

  He smiled in the dark. “We will not concern ourselves with him. I will see to your protection.”

  “And I worry about you, Ahmed. From the little you have told me, I know you must do dangerous things.”

  “They are not so dangerous.”

  “You lie to make me feel better,” she said.

  “They are not so dangerous, most of the time. Usually, they are quite boring. After this operation, I will be back in El Bardi performing boring tasks, and then we will be together almost all of the time.”

  “What is it about this operation that makes it so perilous, Ahmed? Could you resign your position before it occurs?”

  “Resign? No, I do not think so.”

  “I have some money,” she said. “Money I have not told you about. You could quit.”

  There was so much concern in her trembling fingertips as they stroked the side of his neck, and his distaste for Ramad was so near the surface, that he told her.

  *

  “Before you say anything,” Martin Church told George Embry, “sit down.”

  Embry sat in the chair facing Church’s desk. “I received a message from Cummings.”

  “Well, forget it. The DCI couldn’t convince the security council, and Icarus is history. Pull her out of Tobruk. I’ve got to call Wyatt and tell him to stand down.”

  Embry ignored him, saying, “It was a long message.”

  “Long,” Church said absently. He was so incensed with the DCI and his petty and self-serving games that he couldn’t focus properly.

  “Yeah, a long, long message. You want to know what she said?”

  “You’re going to tell me, no matter what.”

  “Yup. She’s in love with the subject.”

  “She what!” Martin Church yelped.

  George Embry held up his left hand, palm out. “Careful, Marty. Remember your blood pressure.”

  “She can’t be in love with him! Goddamn it! That’s just not done.”

  “Hey,” Embry said, “you’ve got to give her credit for telling us.”

  “How can one of our agents fall in love with a goddamned Libyan terrorist? Tell me that!”

  The comers of Embry’s mouth dipped. “He doesn’t really fit the definition, Marty. Our army Rangers at Benning trained him, after all.”

  “And Cummings has fallen for the guy. Jesus! The whole damned world’s going to hell.”

  “I don’t think it affects her job,” Embry said.

  “Christ! If you believe that, you’re nuts, too!”

  Church climbed out of his chair and turned toward the window. The forest along the Potomac appeared excessively green, as if someone had been playing with the tint adjustment on his private view.

  Then he remembered that Embry always saved the best, or the most shocking, for last.

  He whirled around to stare at the man who handled the African desk.

  Embry wasn’t smiling.

  “She’s still doing her job, you say. What are you holding back, George?”

  “Ramad has planned himself a little demonstration, Marty. He calls it Test Strike.”

  “Test Strike? What does it do?”

  “It shows the Israelis, and us, I suppose, that the great Leader has balls. He’s going to reveal his arsenal of chemical weapons.”

  “I don’t suppose this will come in a press release, will it, George?”

  “No. It’s a practical demonstration of three different chemical agents. If she’s got it right, they’ll be psychological, toxic, and nerve agents. There won’t be any announcements, but we’re supposed to read between the lines, I think.”

  “How practical is the demonstration?”

  “From their point of view, Marty? Very. They’re going to attack three Ethiopian refugee camps simultaneously.”

  “Shit!”

  “It’s the truth, as far as we can tell.”

  Church collapsed back into his desk chair. “Refugee camps.”

  “I suppose the Leader feels that no one will complain unduly about the loss of a few thousand mouths to feed. I suppose also that he’ll film the attacks for the benefit of the Israelis. Deliver the tapes by accident, as it were.”

  “My God!”

  “He’s going to show them how he can operate over long distances, with all of the logistics that involves, as well as deploy devastating ordnance.”

  Church was less stunned by the revelation than he was professing. He had seen too many examples of man’s inhumanity, and he knew that Arabic extremist groups — which was not to condemn all Arabs — were the driving forces behind many of the examples in his archives.

  “Damn it, George! Why do you always wait so long to spring these disasters on me?”

  “That’s not the worst part, Marty.”

  “Shit, again!”

  “It happens on August second.”

  *

  Wyatt thought that his people were going to be ready by their date of departure, August 4.

  They had been getting almost five hours a day out of each Phantom during the training and shakeout phase. The first flights had resulted in a rash of small but important glitches in the weapons and electronic systems. Kriswell and Demion were at fever pitch, diagnosing problems, supervising corrections, and reprogramming software.

  He stood in the wide-open door of Hangar 4 and watched as Barr brought three-six in for a perfect landing. The sleek jet whistled by, heading for the end of the runway.

  “He’s still not getting the correct hydraulic brake pressure,” Demion said. “He’s having to fight it a little on the roll-out.”

  “Is that analysis by your observation or by report, Jim?”

  “Observation, but you can be damned sure he’ll complain about it.”

  Barr’s F-4 wheeled around and off the runway as Hackley passed him, lined up, and took off. The scream of turbojets had become almost a continual background noise. Down at the civilian end of the tarmac, no one had complained. Quite often, there were a few carloads of kids, and sometimes of adults, parked near the office so that Noble Enterprises had a spectator section.

  Barr parked the F-4E in front of the hangar, popped the canopy, and clambered out when Hank Cavanaugh brought the ladder out to the plane. He shed h
is helmet and carried it in the crook of his elbow as he approached them.

  “Hey, Jim, the brakes are squishy on the left side.”

  “What’d I tell you, Andy?” Demion went back into the hangar to find someone to work on the brake hydraulic system.

  Barr stopped in front of Wyatt.

  “I’m going to head for town and get a couple hours of nap time and make a phone call.”

  “Okay.”

  “You want to know who I’m going to call?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to call Jan-baby.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m going to ask her to marry me,” Barr said.

  That got Wyatt’s attention. “I don’t think I caught that, Bucky.”

  “Sure you did. We’ve got to keep her somehow, and I guess it’s up to me to do it.”

  “Bucky…”

  Barr turned and walked off to where two of the three Jeeps were parked. He tossed his helmet into the front seat, followed it, started the engine, and drove off.

  Just as a pickup from the airport office came rattling up to Wyatt.

  The airport manager poked his head out the window. “Hi, Mr. Cowan.”

  “Afternoon.” Wyatt couldn’t remember his name.

  “You’ve got a long-distance call on my line. It must be important ’cause they said they’d hold while I came down here after you.”

  “Thanks. I’ll follow you back down.”

  The manager took a good, close-up look at three-six and whistled his appreciation before engaging the clutch and making a U-turn.

  Wyatt crawled into the last of their Jeep Wagoneers and followed him back to the office, skirting wide around a Piper Cherokee parked at the fuel pumps. Inside the office, in rather blessed air-conditioning, he picked up the telephone resting on the counter.

  “Cowan.”

  “This is the East Coast calling. You know me?”

  The voice belonged to Embry.

  “I know you.”

  “We’ve got a little problem, if I lie a bit. It’s a big one, actually.”

  “This is nothing new,” Wyatt said.

  “You know what today is?”

  “The thirtieth of July.”

  “There’s going to be a disaster of mega proportions on the second of August.”

  “The hell there is.”