Arachnosaur

by Richard Jeffries

  So, Eshe Rahal thought in a strange, almost unnatural, calm. He expects to leave survivors and escape safely.

  As soon as he had come in, Rahal had looked up from the table, where she had been intently scribbling formulas. She was expecting, hoping for, and even praying that it was Josiah Key, but froze as soon as she saw the gun. Key didn’t carry his gun in Dubai, nor even a smartphone, to avoid detection.

  Then, for the first time since the attack on the desert tent, everything seemed to decelerate. The doctor within Rahal understood it as the mental state called slow motion perception, where massive amounts of sensory input caused rapid saccadic eye movement, which altered the brain’s perception of time.

  So she watched the assassin carefully survey the area with both his eyes and the gun barrel until it centered on the face of a young Ethiopian who was already on her knees, waving her arms and screeching in Arabic.

  “Not me, not me, they promised!” Rahal’s brain slowly translated through the girl’s accent. “I did as you—”

  The assassin pumped a nine-millimeter round into her face.

  That was why he was here, Rahal realized. The frightened, desperate girl had betrayed them. Then the assistant professor watched calmly as the killer started walking across the room toward her. He held the gun slightly down and to the right as he came steadily closer.

  From the left, another girl leaped at him, screeching and clawing. He smoothly pulled the gun up and over and shot her in the chest. Rahal suddenly understood where the term shoot her down came from, as the poor girl was punched to the floor rugs by the bullet. A third shrieking girl charged him from behind.

  Stop screaming, stop screaming, Rahal’s mind begged them, but she stayed silent and still, watching it all like an analytic scientist. As she feared, the killer simply twisted, brought the gun behind him, and shot her in the head—without slowing his steady pace.

  Then, as Rahal watched dispassionately, no longer hearing the screams of fear or really noticing the others crawling, scrambling, and running away, he turned toward her, still steadily striding. When he finally stopped, ten feet away from her, and pointed the gun at her face, Rahal closed her eyes and prayed.

  In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful, I seek refuge with Allah from Satan, the accursed.

  She did not expect to open them again. When she heard a different sort of scream, a deeper, masculine one, Rahal opened her eyes to see that everything was back at normal speed. The killer’s right wrist was cleaved open and gutting blood, while his left hand was tight over his right eye, and even more blood was seeping through his fingers there.

  Hadiyah, who was holding the kitchen knife in one hand, grabbed the fallen Glock with the other and scuttled back. Lailani, who was across from the mama-san, was holding her dominatrix whip at the ready. She had already split the man’s eye open with her first strike.

  The two had attacked at the same time. And neither had made a sound while doing it.

  The man screeched in Arabic, unsure as to who to attack now. Seeing only with his one remaining good eye, he realized that the older woman had the gun, and the Filipino had the whip. So he painfully focused on Rahal, then, face twisted in pain and rage, he charged the unarmed woman.

  Or, more accurately, the woman who seemed unarmed. Because she had already learned from Key that anything could be a weapon, and the more unexpected, the better. The assistant professor stood and brought the chair she’d been sitting on up and around in one strong arc. It smashed into the assassin’s face like a coarse wooden scythe.

  He staggered, miraculously managing to stay upright, then slammed face first into a roaring SUV grill that came ripping through the canvas wall, filling the space with the sound of screeching tires.

  Everyone but the driver was out of the Renault before it had even completely stopped. Gonzales leaped to Hadiyah’s side, and claimed the Glock with her approval and gratitude.

  “Typical chauvinistic arrogance,” the mama-san seethed, breathing deeply. “If they had used a woman with a knife, Eshe would already be dead.”

  Daniels ran toward Lailani, but, as he picked up on what had happened, his pace slowed and his grin widened. But it was Rahal who ran to Key. Rather than the other way around, as he carefully studied the situation.

  “We’ve got to go,” he told the others urgently as Rahal clung to him. He had already informed them that the enemy already knew everything. “Now.”

  They would remember that “now,” in retrospect, as a cue. Because the moment he said it, the rest of the secret shelter’s carpet walls and canvas ceiling came down, torn and trodden by the boots of a fully equipped assault unit, whose armaments and uniform color they recognized. In the next second, the three men and three women who remained were surrounded by an arena-shaped phalanx of M4 carbines.

  “Belay that,” Captain Patrick Logan said harshly as he stepped up to within an inch of Daniels’s face. “And what the hell is a corporal doing giving orders to a sergeant anyway, dammit!”

  * * * *

  Rahal finally broke the silence. “Where are we?”

  “Glad you asked,” Daniels said with a mirthless smirk. “You want to tell her, Joe?”

  Key exhaled strongly as he continued to rest his cheek on one fist. “‘Undisclosed location, Eshe.” He sighed. “You can always tell from the handcuffs and hoods they used on us.”

  “And the lovely décor of the place they brought us to,” Daniels added, spreading his arms to encompass the severe plainness of the rectangular room, a room equipped with only a bolted down table and five non-bolted-down chairs. It could have been any interview room in any headquarters anywhere in the world.

  Key sat up, swiveled, and looked at her. “But, in case you didn’t count off the amount of time we were being driven, I’m guessing the American consulate, close to the shores of Dubai Creek.” He smiled at the little, dark surveillance balls wedged six different places along the ceiling. “Got that right?”

  His insolence had the effect he wanted. The single door in the corner slammed open, and Captain Logan stormed in, carrying a thick file. He stomped to the table, yanked out a chair, and slammed the file down.

  Daniels’s eyebrows rose when he realized the captain was alone, but that didn’t surprise Key. He imagined the captain had even switched off the video and audio recorders just before he entered. The subject of their inevitable discussion would be highly sensitive indeed.

  Daniels’s eyebrows rose even farther when Second Lieutenant Barbara Strenkofski reached in and gripped the outside door handle before slowly and quietly closing it. Rahal saw the sergeant and second louie’s eyes meet before the blonde sealed the door with herself outside, but, try as she might, the professor couldn’t read it. But when Daniels’s returned his attention to the table, he couldn’t hide a small smile.

  Logan either ignored or didn’t see it. His eyes tried to bore into Key’s as the corporal pulled himself closer to the table directly across from the captain. On the basis of all the American movies she’d seen, Rahal expected Key to start making strong, logical demands like, “Have you arrested Jean-Bernard Toussaint? You should be searching for Usa Awar rather than us!”

  But, instead, Key just sat silently and calmly waiting. He even crossed his arms and leaned back.

  Logan was forced to speak first. “You think you’re so goddamned smart, don’t you, Corporal?”

  Key seemed to consider that question, then put his hands on the table and leaned in. “No, sir,” he said honestly. “I’m just trying to do what I think is best. I know you are too, sir.”

  At first, Logan reacted as if his bear trap had snapped onto Key’s ankles, but, when he spoke, his mouth moved as if he was sucking something bitter. “You know what I see, Corporal? I see one soldier who follows orders, and another soldier who doesn’t. And we both know what happens to a marine who doesn’t follow ord
ers, don’t we?”

  Key seemed to be considering that as well. He didn’t have to say, “He doesn’t get promoted,” because everyone in the room was loudly thinking it. Neither did he say what Daniels wanted him to, something along the lines of, “What about planting tracking devices without our knowledge, or collaborating with the enemy instead of stealing from him,” or other such nonsense. Instead Key just sat there, thinking.

  Rahal realized she was holding her breath.

  Finally Key opened his mouth. “Yes, sir,” he said, motioning to the thick file Logan was holding like a life preserver. “But I’m already in so deep, I really got nothing to lose, so let’s face it.” He stared calmly and deeply into Logan’s icy stare. “I know, and you know. Now tell me how you’re convincing yourself you’re doing the right thing.”

  The two men held the stare for five long seconds. Daniels watched Logan’s lips to see if he was mentally counting it off. But, as far as he could tell, the captain’s lips only got thinner.

  “I don’t have to tell you shit-all, Private Key,” their commanding officer finally said, nearly snarling. He slapped open the file and gave it a sheet-metal glance. “I’d read off the charges against you but we’d be here all day, and I got far more important things to do.” He slapped the file closed and stood, his fists on the table, staring down at Key. “Suffice it to say that your coconspirators will be detained for indefinite debriefing, and, if I have my way, you’ll be sunk so far and so deep for so long that—”

  The trio were spared from whatever agonized metaphor the captain was about to trot out by the door. It snapped open, swung in, and slammed against the wall so sharply that Rahal gave out a surprised squeal, and even Logan grimaced.

  Framed in the doorway was a tall, chiseled, older man in what Key recognized as the uniform of a full three-star retired general. “Then you better not have your way, Captain,” he said in a voice that sounded like gravel being smeared on a bass drum.

  Key didn’t know who he was. Daniels did.

  Holy shit, the sergeant thought in disbelief, praying that he wasn’t talking aloud. Lionheart Lancaster.

  Logan gaped for a moment, then instantly snapped to attention and gave the intruder a stiff salute.

  “At ease, Captain,” said General Charles L. Lancaster, retired, as he stepped into the room with his own very thin file. He turned and smiled and nodded with understanding at the stunned blonde outside. “You too, Second Lieutenant.” Then he closed the door on her shaken, disbelieving face.

  “Sir, what, to what do I—” Logan stammered, and stepped back.

  “I said ‘at ease, Captain,’” Lancaster said affably, putting his arm around Logan’s shoulder and slowly moving him back toward the chair. “No need to get up on my account.” Logan sat, looking as if he had just been slapped in the face with a fish, as the retired general surveyed the others with a shrewd smile. “Sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t stand idly by to a miscarriage of military justice.”

  That brought Logan back to his previous height. “Sir, with all due respect, this is none of your concern, or, if I may say, business. This is strictly marine protocol, and you gave up that right when you—”

  But the captain’s defensive diatribe withered when Lancaster made mild swatting motions with his hands, while smiling even wider, as if the whole thing was just a misunderstanding. “I’m afraid it is both my concern and my business, Captain, since these men, and, as you called them, their coconspirators, have just been assigned to the Cerberus Unit.”

  “The Cerberus—” Logan blurted. “I’ve never heard of the—” But by then Lancaster had presented him the lone piece of paper from his file, and again, with just a guiding hand on his shoulder and the power of his personality, urged the captain to sit back down.

  Daniels, especially, was vastly entertained by the tumbling expressions of shock and awe on Logan’s face, and by the way his eyes pinballed around his sockets as he read.

  “All charges dropped? Immediate assignment overriding all others? Complete discretion to investigate national and international threats beyond those of normal military protocol?” He looked up from the order like he was having a heart attack. “But, but—” he struggled, hurriedly searching through his own thick file. “I have a direct order from the secretary of defense to do whatever necessary to secure—”

  “Did you note my letter’s signature?” Lancaster asked gently.

  Rahal could hear the kindness in the general’s voice, but also recognized the steel sword serving as its spine. And Daniels thought that, by the way Logan’s eyes bulged, he might be about to go the way Goodman and Ayman had.

  Although Retired General Charles Leonidas Lancaster was nominally speaking to Logan, he was looking directly at the other seated man. “I’d say an order from the commander-in-chief trumps one from the secretary of defense,” he concluded with a smile that might have contained slivers of Logan’s soul. “Wouldn’t you, Sergeant Major Key?”

  Chapter 27

  What many called hardship, Cala Haza called life. She knew no other way of living, so, for her, walking along mountain paths to get water, spending the day milking the cow, tending sheep, grinding flour, keeping bees, picking corn, raising wheat, preparing food, and then filling the evening weaving or embroidering, was normal. Sometimes she watched the village boys play soccer in the dirt as the sun went down, bathing the mountain in swaths of gold.

  Once a month a traveling teacher gathered all the children of her Yemeni mountain village to tell them of the rest of the country and the outside world. Today was that day, so Cala hurried along to the one-room brick schoolhouse.

  “Yemen,” the teacher said, “is an impoverished nation on the southwestern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is alongside Bab-el-Mandeb, a slender channel that divides the country from the Horn of Africa, where it joins the Red Sea on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other.”

  Cala accepted that, but didn’t truly understand his use of the word impoverished. She had shelter. It may have been simple and made of bricks and cement born of the mountain, like all the others in Wuyan village, but it kept her dry and warm. She had clothing, a bright Sana’ani dress made of multicolored Al-Masoon cloth she dyed herself. She had even knitted her own Al-Momq head cover, paying particular attention to the red and white decorations. And there was food, goat and lamb as well as plentiful herbs and vegetables.

  “Yemen,” the teacher elaborated, “has four main regions: eastern highlands, coastal plains, western highlands, and the Rub al Khali desert. You are near all of them.”

  That was good. Thanks to him, Cala knew where she was in the world. Those words were helpful, but the teacher had even more words,words that sounded like a fable. “Here,” the teacher had said, “there is a war. A war between the government, Houthi rebels, fanatics, and even foreign countries.”

  That, Cala truly couldn’t understand. She thought that fights were between two people, not four. The teacher tried to clarify the situation, but his explanations became more and more confusing. Thankfully, it got better when the teacher finally revealed that the snipers, tanks, and air raids were far away, in the southwestern cities. She and all her fellow villagers were actually part of the huge majority in Yemen, the ones who lived in the country, or on the mountainsides. Here, life stayed much as it had been for generations, so the end of the teacher’s lesson also puzzled her.

  “Estimates state that more than three million Yemenis have been displaced,” he said. Cala asked what that meant, so the teacher answered that they had been forced to leave their homes. Cala thought that was awful until the teacher said that Yemen had a total population of twenty-five million. That made Cala feel better because that meant many more people weren’t displaced.

  For some reason, that seemed to upset the teacher, who then said that, of those twenty-five million, twenty-one million needed something called humanitarian as
sistance. When the teacher couldn’t explain that to Cala’s satisfaction, he finished the day’s lesson by saying at least ten thousand people had been killed in the war.

  “The cities’ wars?” Cala asked. The teacher had not answered that, and soon left Wuyan to continue his teaching in the nearby villages. Cala walked slowly out of the schoolhouse with the other children, who ran to the fields or home. Cala watched the teacher make his way down the grassy rocks until he reached some concrete steps the villagers had forced into the hillsides to help the pack donkeys navigate, as well as for the occasional visitor.

  Cala let her eyes wander from the teacher to the mountainsides all around him; mountainsides filled with green trees veined by brown rocks, and dotted with concrete squares of housing. Above it all were blue skies splashed with cottony white clouds. She recognized everyone in the village as they carried food and firewood, wearing their flowing outfits of black, blue, orange, pink, and yellow.

  When she looked back, the teacher was gone. Soon she knew his teachings would be gone too. Even though she knew of no other, she was certain that her life in Wuyan was a good life, and she was content.

  Cala Haza then looked down because she felt something under her feet. A vibration shivered the woven sandals she had made herself. It was almost nothing, as if the Earth had hummed, but it was something she had never felt before. It didn’t feel like an earthquake.

  She kept looking as the ground beneath her kept humming, and would have stayed that way for a while longer if she had not felt something on her head. She reached up and pulled from her brown hair a strand of gold, as if sunlight had taken form. She used her other hand to stretch it. Like the ground shivering didn’t feel like an earthquake, the strand didn’t feel like silk.

  But as she stared at it, more golden strands, glimmering in the sunlight, floated down into her vision. Cala raised her head to see shimmering strands raining down from over the hill, like white bubbles at the end of a breaking ocean wave. They rolled over each like lace taking shape on a loom. As they grew, the shivering beneath her feet grew as well, until it felt like a cat’s purr.