Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Not in itself, no. To me, the sound of the muezzin’s call to prayer is a beautiful thing, too. Like a hymn.

  The pilgrims turning in their orbits around the black-draped monolith of the Kaaba inside the Great Mosque at Mecca—that’s a mesmerizing spectacle. I’ve only seen it on film. I can only imagine how it must be in person.”

  He looked away from the prayerful and back to Jim.

  “But religion is best left private when people are outside their place of worship. Public space is always ‘mixed company.’ Inherently political. It’s just not healthy—or polite—to mix politics and religion.”

  Jim glanced at him, but said nothing for all that the word morality hovered above his tongue.

  “We’re becoming the thing we fear,” Amaral continued. “Just two sides of the same interrogation-room mirror. Fundamentalism is fascist religion, as sure as fascism is fundamentalist politics. Though none of them call it fascism or even fundamentalism anymore. They’re all just ‘religious conservatives’ or ‘Dominionists’ now.”

  Over his AR glasses, Director Brescoll arched an eyebrow at his old friend.

  “Man, you have spent a lot of time out of the country!”

  “True enough. But whenever you wrap your God in your flag, you’re bound to increase intolerance for your fellow human beings and their ways, and reduce respect for them as people, too. They say it just shows they have ‘conviction,’ but their convictions are making the world a more violent and hate-filled place. That’s a disservice to both God and flag.”

  “These folks hardly seem the mirror-image of jihadists, though,” Jim said, nodding in the direction of the praying tourists.

  “Maybe not, but the type of god preached in fundamentalist madrasas, fundamentalist yeshivas, fundamentalist churches and schools—it’s the same mirror-god of hate. For everybody who sees sex, or family, or religion, or nature different from how you do, well, just hate ‘em, that’s all. Hate, hate, hate.

  God’s going to burn up all your enemies in the end-time anyway. They all agree on that.”

  “Hatred doesn’t sound like God or Yahweh or Allah to me,” Jim said. “That’s just how people have twisted the message.”

  “I don’t doubt it! The vast majority of Muslims, Christians, and Jews are moderates—and compassionate people of good intent. The god of hate is a flag-or rhetoric-wrapped product of the fundamentalists’ own fundaments. Nothing divine about it. They shouldn’t call where they pray ‘churches’ or ‘temples’ or ‘mosques.’ They’re all really worship-corporations fighting for market share. If we really believed in the separation of church and state, we’d have taken away their tax-exempt status at the first sign of their engaging in political advocacy—and taxed them like any other business.”

  Jim smiled and shook his head.

  “It’s a good thing you’ve been overseas. You’re just a little too forthright in your views for the homefront.”

  “Yeah. I’d probably have needed diplomatic immunity in my native country.”

  Jim laughed, but then grew more serious.

  “They can still shunt you to a back desk or out of government completely. Just remember, old buddy: if you keep banging your heart against the mountain, don’t be surprised when it’s not the mountain that breaks.”

  Staring at the Anubis god-dog head atop his walking stick, Amaral gave a world-weary shrug.

  “Just traveled too far and seen too much, Jim,” he said. “Sometimes I think that if this planet were a restaurant the soup of the day would be wingnut stew in hot petroleum broth. But so long as the holy folks of whatever stripe don’t damn me to their version of heaven or martyr me for their version of paradise, then I’m quite content to live and let live.”

  Amaral pulled a sheaf of documents from his antique briefcase. “And I’ll keep my job because I know what I’m talking about and I get the work done. Which is how I found out a little more about this fellow Fremdkunst and his meteorites.”

  Amaral handed Jim two reports, each of which prominently featured a list.

  “Interesting character. Travels a lot between Israel and Saudi Arabia. I have some acquaintances in the state security apparatuses of both countries. They helped with background on this one.”

  Jim nodded absently as he looked at the reports. He saw that, between them, the lists detailed Victor Fremdkunst’s plane and train journeys between Jerusalem and Riyadh.

  “Good work. Hmm. These documents say he was on business. Do you know what kind?”

  Dan leaned back on the bench and looked off into the sky.

  “I dug a little deeper. He’s set himself up as an artist and adventurer. I’ve always thought of those as low-paying occupations, but he’s made surprisingly good money from them. He has quite the legitimate cover story, too, if that’s what it is.”

  “Oh?”

  “Says he’s searching for meteorites, in places where ancient books and legends refer to catastrophic events. He apparently believes those cataclysms were meteoritic in origin.”

  “Where did they supposedly happen?”

  “In Israel, at the Big and Little Craters, south of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, west of Jordan. In his public interviews Fremdkunst claims the meteoritic material he’s found there matches the probable time of destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jim said, doubtful but also intrigued. “I was raised Baptist. I read a lot in my Bible. God rained down fire and brimstone, as I recall. There’s nothing to say brimstone couldn’t be meteorites, but I don’t think that’s what the Bible says.”

  “Brimstone is what I remembered, too, and I was raised Catholic. So I did a little more research.

  Brimstone is burning sulfur. Seems there’ve been a considerable number of instances linking meteorite falls and the smell of sulfur. In fact, all meteorites contain varying amounts of a type of iron sulfide called troilite.”

  Jim glanced up into the sky, trying to see what Dan was seeing, but he saw only sky, not even any clouds.

  “That’s news to me.”

  Amaral nodded, returning his gaze to their more immediate surroundings at last.

  “The clearest example I found happened in 1992. A 1980 Chevy Malibu got nailed by a twenty-six-pound meteorite in Peekskill, New York. When the eighteen-year-old girl who owned the vehicle reached down and touched the stone that had whacked her car, she said it was still warm and smelled strongly of sulfur.”

  Jim barked a laugh at the image of the poor young girl and her meteorite-bashed car.

  “Hmm! Okay, maybe Fremdkunst has a point. What’s he been doing in Saudi?”

  “Exploring around the Wabar craters complex, in the Rub’ al-Khali. There’s an old story of a city there called Ad-ibn Kin, or Wabar, which was supposedly destroyed when God sent a rushing wind and fire from the sky to punish its wicked ruler.” He twirled the head of his cane. “A related story also mentions a block of iron as big as a camel’s hump, called al-Hadida. Or maybe that refers to the entire impact site, too, since that can be translated as ‘the iron’ or ‘the iron things.’”

  Jim leaned forward on his fist, unconsciously imitating of Rodin’s Thinker.

  “That’s what Fremdkunst is after, then?”

  “No, the iron camel’s hump has long since been recovered. Fremdkunst is not the first to look for meteoritic material in the Rub’ al-Khali—not by a long shot. A Brit by the name of Harry St. John Philby led an expedition into the Empty Quarter as early as 1932, in search of the lost city of Wabar.”

  At Dan’s glance to see if he was still paying full attention, Jim nodded but said nothing.

  “Philby called himself Abdullah after he converted to Islam,” Amaral said, stroking his mustache and giving Brescoll a sly look, as if daring him to make some kind of crack. “Interesting character. His son was, too: Kim Philby, the notorious British-Soviet double agent.”

  “But the father, he found the iron block?”

  “No, not even
him. The stories about the disaster from the sky, those differ. One is ancient enough to be a reference in the Koran, but the other probably refers to an event that is only about a century and a half old. Even when and where the city was supposedly destroyed is all confused. The city Philby was probably looking for was Ubar, not Wabar.”

  “Ubar—that was found, wasn’t it?”

  Dan nodded.

  “Maybe, but the jury’s still out. Through the use of satellite imaging, years after old Philby died, a trading center was found—a town that fell into a sinkhole when the cavern it was built on top of collapsed, and was then covered by desert.”

  “Not a happy ending for any city.”

  “No. Whether the satellite-discovered town was in fact Ubar is still being debated. The ending wasn’t happy for Philby, either. All he found were a few craters, some fragments of iron, and black fused-silica globules. The tribesmen believed those black ‘gems’ were the jewels of the female inhabitants of the destroyed city. No ruins of a lost city for Abdullah Philby, and worthless ‘desert pearls’ for the Bedouins who led him there. Everyone was quite disappointed.”

  “No doubt,” Jim said, hoping his expression conveyed adequate sympathy for the failed expedition.

  “Yes, but like Dame Fortune’s wheel, the sands of the Rub’ al-Khali are constantly shifting. In 1965, Bedouin tribesmen found a forty-five-hundred-pound iron meteorite, which they claim is the Hadida. In 1966 an oil company engineer found another four-hundred-and-forty-pound fragment. I’ve seen both of them myself, actually, at King Sa’ud University in Riyadh.”

  Jim frowned in perplexity.

  “If it’s all been found, what’s Fremdkunst after there now?”

  “Apparently he doesn’t believe it has all been found. Pieces of meteoritic iron continue to crop up there, and the scientific consensus is that there are probably other craters beneath the sands around Wabar.

  Nothing of the supposedly destroyed city itself has been found, if it ever existed. Fremdkunst could be trying to find more meteorites, or prove that Ad-ibn Kin is not the same as Ubar, or that a city actually was destroyed, perhaps not far from the Wabar meteoritic impact craters, but much earlier.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a bit like lightning striking the same place twice?”

  “It could happen,” Dan said, shrugging. “At least it gives him a not-too-implausible cover story for being in Saudi, just as he also has for being in Israel.”

  Jim looked narrowly at his old comrade. From the way Dan had let that last sentence hang and glanced away, Jim knew there was more.

  “But you don’t think it’s the whole story?”

  “No. I followed up on some of the links you sent me. In cornering the meteorite market, Fremdkunst has pissed off quite a few people. Some of his critics hinted that he left the military under a bit of a cloud a dozen years ago, so I tried to find out more about that. Turns out one of his army buddies is a secular Arab-American who now works for State in Morocco, my old stomping grounds. I had a talk with him.”

  Jim shifted uncomfortably on the bench.

  “And?”

  “He said in his army days Fremdkunst strongly believed the U.S. government was out of control. All the usual reasons: the electoral process had been subverted, Congress was bought off, the administration was a gang of criminals, there was war profiteering by insiders, a right-wing-dominated United States with no viable internal opposition was well on its way to becoming the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany—but as the lone world superpower or hyperpower. Et cetera.”

  Jim nodded, remembering the strangeness of those days. Fringe right-wingers had come to the center of power, setting up special-plan “offices” in the Pentagon and White House, co-opting the top leadership of NSA and subverting its mission, churning out propaganda to subdue the national conscience so that no forceful American mass movement could rise against their plans—not only in opposition to the planners’ preemptive wars and drive for empire, but also against their fully scripted first-strike use of American weapons of mass destruction against foreign nations and groups. That such use was projected to result in preemptive nuclear kill numbers that would have made Adolf Hitler blush with envy the New American Centurions readily justified in the name of national security.

  Yes, everyone had lived through a paradoxical time—were still living through it, in many ways. A well-lit dark age, a gathering gloom made all the more profound by the ubiquitous screenglow. But things weren’t that dark anymore. He hoped.

  “A legitimate enough critique at the time, I suppose.”

  “Indeed. My source remembered very clearly that Fremdkunst described the government as ‘coked up,’ as in COKT, covert oligarchic kleptocratic theocracy.”

  “Your source has an impressive memory,” Jim said, laughing. “Let’s see. That would mean…what?

  Secret rule by a gang of wealthy thieves posing as moral and godly leaders?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “A certain wit to that, I must admit. And his solution?”

  “He believed the military should take over. Because they were sworn to uphold the Constitution.”

  Jim shook his head in chagrined disbelief.

  “That’s a bit steep. Rather naïve, too. But all this is stuff from some years back in Fremdkunst’s past?”

  “Right. I suppose it could probably be written off as ‘youthful indiscretion.’ But my informant says there was weirder stuff, too.”

  “Such as?”

  “Talk of Satanic fraternities at Yale. Murdered presidential sex-slaves. Major soft-drink companies hiding the fact that their products eat holes in the brains of consumers. Pharmaceutical companies forcibly numbing the minds of a populace already exposed to unknown diseases spread by unexplained chemtrails in the sky. And, of course, a 9/11/01 stand-down, along burning-of-the-Reichstag or Gulf of Tonkin lines—jihadist attacks being part of a plan by CIA and Mossad to globally export terrorist double-agents in order to drive up the profits of defense corporations and the international bankers.”

  Jim raised his hands, as if to ward off more of the same.

  “Wait. Let me guess. ‘The international bankers are all Jewish, and the Israelis have penetrated all aspects of our government and society,’ right?”

  “Which they control through the Federal Reserve Board, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. All the usual suspects. More like youthful crackpottery than indiscretion, if you ask me. Nowadays, of course, he gets along fine with everybody, including the theocrats and oligarchs of both Israel and Saudi Arabia. A completely different man.”

  “Well, maybe someone finally took him aside and showed him that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a forgery perpetrated by the czar’s secret police.”

  “Maybe. It’s also possible he just got shrewder, less ‘forthright’ in his opinions, to use your term.

  Understanding the seductiveness of security—personal or national—does not necessarily render one immune to its allure. Not even in my own case.”

  Amaral shuffled papers back into his bulky briefcase and snapped it shut.

  “At any rate, his interest in meteorites and impact geology has long since put him in touch with a lot of geologists of all specializations, including those in the oil industry. Over the last decade, he’s made some very profitable investments. Some of them seem to have been on the advice of George Otis, among others.”

  “Otis? Mister ‘Godly America Fellowship’? Whew. Doesn’t sound like the ideological traveling companion of someone who once made cracks about covert theocracies.”

  “Money and politics make for strange bedfellows,” Amaral said with a narrowed glance. “Fremdkunst has plenty of involvement in both of those, too—and not only in Saudi Arabia and Israel. He’s wealthy enough to have bought a lot of friends, both military and civilian, in our own government. His military records and ongoing connections inside the armed services might bear some looking into.”

&nb
sp; Jim pondered his friend’s advice. The odds on a Retticker-Fremdkunst connection were getting stronger all the time. But the possibility of George Otis being involved, too—well, that was a new wrinkle. He was a heavyweight, lots of money and connections everywhere inside the Beltway, including with his own boss below the president, Director of National Intelligence Ethan Watson. Maybe it would be a good idea if he called in some of David Fahrney’s clout on this, just in case he needed to even up the odds.

  Always a good thing to have a billionaire inventor, iconoclast, and brilliant autodidact in one’s corner. A strange guardian angel, but he had proven very helpful during the Kwok-Cho affair.

  He slapped his thighs and stood up.

  “Thanks for the information and advice, Dan. I’ll follow up. How about you, though?”

  Dan Amaral squinted up at him.

  “How about me what?”

  “Would you be willing to go on my payroll for a while? As an NSA security liaison, overseas?”

  Amaral paused, giving it some thought.

  “I don’t know if it’s ever a good thing to work for an old friend,” Amaral said, standing up more slowly.

  “This meteorite stuff at least has the appeal of novelty, though. Not what usually comes across my desk at the embassy. If you can arrange the posting, and State can fill my staffing duties, I’m up for it.”

  “Good,” Brescoll said, smiling. “I’ll get to work on it ASAP. Now what say we head to my house for supper? We can discuss your duties while I drive. I know Marion is eager to see you again.”

  THE PREROGATIVE OF FALLING STARS

  The fifteen-hour journey from Riyadh to the Wabar craters complex—in a battered, ancient, sandblasted Zahid Trac Humvee—would have been strange and arduous enough by itself. Avram Zaragosa’s driver, however, made it still more so. The man behind the wheel, Yuri Semenov, seemed at first to be afflicted with the chattiness of a hermit who, having spent too much time in various deserts around the world, had at long last found a captive audience in Avram.