Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  If she did manage to go, he knew that among the thousands upon thousands of hajjis, odds were that he would not encounter her. Even if by some inscrutable fortune their paths did cross, she likely would not recognize him.

  What if she did, though? What would his options be? He tried not to think about that, hoping only that he would be able to always keep before him, with aching clarity, the image of his daughter’s remains—and the imperative of revenge for that terrible crime.

  “What do you see out the ‘comparative religion’ peephole?” Avram asked.

  “Judaism, tracing its origins back to Moses, and Christianity back to Christ, and, through the Prophet, Islam tracing its origin back to Abraham. Sadly, in every one of those faiths, the original revelation has been corrupted by later political accretions. In each it is harder and harder to see the truth that came into the darkness through that particular peephole. That’s why I’m a fundamental secularist, or a secular fundamentalist, if you prefer.”

  An odd thing to say, Avram thought. Recalling Vida’s comment about Mahmoud’s unexpected fluency in Farsi, and Vida’s own diasporan family history, he wondered if Mahmoud might be a son of an old-line Baathist or something.

  “Okay, but how do meteorites tie into that?”

  “Ah, that’s where I’m more fundamentalist than anyone! I want to tear away the corruptions that have accreted and get back to the cornerstone of all these faiths—the sacred skystone, which, in every case, provided the lens or peephole through which the initial revelation came! The Black Stone the angel Gabriel brought down from the sky and gave to Abraham. The pillow-stone that gave Jacob his dream-vision. The grail-cup and the bleeding head of the spear that pierced Jesus’ side. All the aniconic deity-stones Pittman writes about. They all stood by sacred springs throughout the Mediterranean, just as the Black Stone still stands near Zamzam, the sacred spring once holy to al-Uzzah, goddess of springs.

  “The Great Mosque at Makkah is probably the last place where that ancient complex of meteoritic stone and sacred spring can still be found—preserved by the very same accretions that have obscured its meaning. The presence of that Black Stone once made the Kaaba and the area around it a place of peace and religious tolerance. I think the power is still there to spread that peace throughout the world, if we can just recover it. I think that’s what you and everyone back at the Wabar camp are actually all about, whether you know it or not.”

  “What do you mean?” Avram asked, trying to keep any note of suspicion out of his voice.

  “Oh, come now, Doctor Zaragosa! I saw what was going on at Wabar. I saw the many meteorite samples Victor Fremdkunst shipped there, and the extraction work your fellow scientists were doing on them. I saw those children they brought in, too.”

  “And that’s connected to the Black Stone…how?”

  “In Makkah, you’ll see that the Black Stone is worshipped in a patched-together form, its fragments sealed in pitch and bound together with silver wire. What is happening at Wabar is also a ‘patching together.’ From a mosaic of skystones brought from all over the world, you too were trying to extract and splice together the pure form of whatever material power once made those stones holy objects of veneration, bringers of peace. Those innocent children are part of that work, too, whether you believe it or not.”

  Avram said nothing, he just stared at Mahmoud as they rode through the night. Mahmoud smiled broadly, taking Avram’s silence as proof of the rightness of his speculation. In fact, Avram was silent not from being stunned at the rightness of Mahmoud’s speculation, but rather at the man’s stupendous wrongness about Avram’s own role.

  What would the man think if it turned out that Avram was not traveling to Mecca to patch things together but rather to blow things apart? To kill or destroy the men responsible for his daughter’s death? To steal or destroy the Black Stone itself, even as his daughter, Enide, had been stolen from him, destroyed, blown to pieces?

  The longer he traveled, the more certain he became that the goal of his journey was not just to steal the “bringer of peace” at Mecca, but to break that peace, smash it to dust. If that brought a war to shake the round world right down to its imagined cornerstones, so be it.

  Mahmoud was so caught up in his own myth of corruptions and accretions—call it “The Fall That Befell the Fallen Stars”—that he’d completely missed what Avram might be about. For all his talk of mirrors and peepholes, Mahmoud had failed to see what Avram, given his secret perspective, now clearly saw: the mirror opposite of nongovernmental religious terrorists attacking secular financial and military centers would be government-backed political terrorists attacking holy sites.

  Avram shook his head—and only from doing so did he see a light far off to the northeast.

  “Mahmoud!” he said, pointing. “Looks like we’ve got company coming!”

  They both brought their quad ATVs to a halt. A distant searchlight seemed to be scanning the desert and moving in their general direction.

  “A helicopter, judging from the altitude and speed.”

  Avram nodded.

  “Let’s get these quads parked close together. We can toss the chameleon tent over us and them.”

  “Like a camouflage tarp—good idea.”

  Working quickly, they did so. Now they could only watch and wait to see what happened.

  The helicopter came on, its searchlight stalking like a great single bright-footed leg before it. They could hear the machine coming now, its sound and its light growing closer. They gasped a sigh of relief as the light passed near and then flashed beyond their position—at a goodly slant, given that the helicopter was perhaps half a kilometer to the south and east of them. The two did not truly begin to relax, however, until the sound and light had faded far enough away that they were sure it wasn’t going to be swinging in a wide circle back toward them.

  “That was pretty close,” Mahmoud said as they came out from under the tarp.

  Avram shrugged.

  “Do you think they were looking for us?” he asked his mutawwif.

  “I’m not sure. The army is always on alert for smugglers out here.”

  “Maybe we should be more watchful during our night rides in the future,” Avram suggested. “More careful where we make camp during the day, too.”

  Mahmoud nodded. They folded up the tent and packed away gear before remounting their ATVs and taking up their course again. As they rolled onward over the Arabian sand sea, they had little more to say. They stayed that way, silent in the desert silence, under the stars and the moon, until the sun came up out of the earth.

  EIGHT

  TARGET ZONE INTERLUDE

  Dammit! Vida thought, awakened from a sound sleep. What now?

  She heard the whump! of explosion followed by the nattering, drumming sound of automatic weapons fire, punctuated by the occasional louder, single shot. Looking—cautiously—out the triangular yome windows, she saw tracer bullets arcing into the sky, and heard the hollow whoosh of rocket-propelled grenades. At about that same instant she heard the sound of helicopters coming in low and fast, then circling and returning fire.

  Stay? Run? Into the desert? Into the night? She looked out the windows again, to see the edge of the nearest Wabar crater glittering in the fire from what, a moment before, had been the camp’s “security barrack.” It was a far sturdier building than her yome, and it was nothing but a broken column of fire, now.

  To hell with this. She charged out the back door of the yome. Almost immediately she collided with someone—one of the binotechnicians. Several other techs were with him. As she picked herself off the ground, she saw by the light of the growing conflagration that the helicopters were hovering very near the ground, troops sliding like spidery offspring to earth on lines from the helos’ bellies.

  “Don’t shoot! We’re unarmed!” She shouted it in both English and Arabic, and the group of techs began doing the same. Although she was only trying to get herself out of the chaos and confusion of a n
ight battle, she now found she was leading the group.

  She should have known this was going to happen. First Avram and Ankawi left, supposedly separately.

  Then, only hours ago, Fremdkunst and Michelson and Levitch had been seen loading up the old Zahid Humvees and heading into the desert. Desert rats, forsaking the Wabar camp as its fortune sank. They must have known this was coming—and left everybody else to twist in the wind. She could have kicked herself for not paying better attention to the signs.

  They had not walked far when a line of tracered gunfire sprayed up sand before them.

  “We’re civilians! Noncombatants!” she shouted. “We’re unarmed, damn you!”

  The only answer she received was laughter. Derisive male laughter.

  After a moment, a squad of men approached them. Their leader, a young man with a razor-thin mustache and a smirking, haughty manner, demanded in Arabic if any of them knew a man named Zaragosa.

  “Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you, you idiot dog!” Vida said. She regretted it even before the butt of his gun impacted the side of her head.

  When she came to, she found herself propped up against the wall of one of the modulabs with the rest of the techs. There were more of them now—and more guards, too. Several of them spoke English—American English. Two of them grabbed her by the arms, hauled her up, and dragged her out of the group.

  This is going to be some night, she thought.

  A BRIEF SOJOURN IN WABAR

  Michael glanced out the window of the helicopter as the helo droned on through the desert night, playing its spotlight before it. That had been Darla’s idea—scanning the desert for the Mawari kids. An off chance, but worth taking.

  Around him the raiding party of Central Security Service soldiers sat in the same stealthy smart armor he, Darla, and Susan also wore, and in whose operation they had been given a crash course. Amaral had opted out when it came to such smart-armored adventuring, deciding instead to remain with Brescoll at NSA headquarters.

  Not that Director Brescoll would be out of the loop. Before they had left the States, the director had walked them through old OPS 1 and the revamped National Security Operations Center—across the “NSOC” acronym initials inlaid in the floor, through automatic glass doors, under the seals of the three armed-service organizations that made up NSA’s military forces, the Central Security Services.

  “This place always makes me think of a combination White House situation room and NASA-JPL deep-space monitoring facility,” Brescoll said as he led them through the labyrinth of low-walled cubicles and workstations that mazed the floor, each section separated by target-category.

  Michael found himself agreeing with the director’s description. The place indeed looked to be the love child of political and technological imperatives—a hive of telepresent command, control, communications, and intelligence activities. Computer monitors glowed atop the tables and desks. Large, flat-panel video display screens covered the walls, mapping time and space in sometimes inscrutable fashion.

  Several of the younger techs wore augmented reality glasses, heads-up displays for everyday life, including the new ARGUS blinks. Others had eyetracking pseudoholo display screens on their desktops.

  A goodly number of interactive display domes—shiny and new, by the looks of them—seemed to occupy most of the niche between the numerous “flashbar” pseudoholos and the much less common “airbenders,” the more impressive (and expensive) holographic projector units, suspending their fully dimensional data-ghosts over a very few workstations.

  They passed through the buzz of Room 3E099 to a much more private room just beyond it.

  “The Executive Command Suite,” Brescoll told them as they entered. “If it smells new and improved in here, that’s because it is. Setting this up was one of the first orders of business after I succeeded to the directorship.”

  Brescoll demonstrated the way in which the ECS functioned as a sort of meta-NSOC, possessing many of the capabilities of the entire Center but operable by a single person, if need be.

  “We can’t get you behind the eyeballs of distant people the way the Mawari kids apparently did with you, Doctor Pittman,” Brescoll told them, “but we’ve got the next best thing. Our friends in the National Reconnaisance Office are moving one of their sky-eye satellites into geosynch orbit over the Arabian Peninsula between Wabar and Mecca. Optical and auditory feeds from your smart-armor, along with many other inputs, will be channeled real-time to the equipment here. What you see and hear there, Dan and I will see and hear here.”

  Although at most times he had a healthy paranoia about anything having to do with reconnaisance and surveillance, Michael found Brescoll’s statement oddly reassuring, especially after Brescoll carefully laid out for them how wrought-up things had become, since the Temple Mount incident in the entire region from the eastern Med to the Himalayas.

  “We had a helluva time getting Saudi clearance for this operation,” Brescoll told them before they left the ECS. “They only agreed to allow it if their own forces also participated. Of course, if anything goes wrong, they’ll disavow any knowledge of the plan and claim they had to destroy the invaders—that’s you, people—on grounds of protecting their borders and national sovereignty.”

  Such revelations didn’t exactly encourage faith, hope, and charity, Michael thought. Or peace, love, and understanding, either. Right now, all he was really trying to do was encourage himself to stay awake—no easy task, given the hours they’d spent on flights getting here, the monotony of the desert over which they flew, and the relentless rhythmic thudding of the military helicopter’s props. Susan and Darla, he saw, were already dozing, though the CSS troops still remained resolutely awake and alert.

  His payoff for staying awake was witnessing the terrible beauty of the firefight already under way as they approached the Wabar research camp. Tracer bullets lit up the night sky before them. Defenders on the ground were firing upon Saudi helicopters coming around from the east and the south as they themselves approached from the north.

  They hovered only long enough for the CSS troops to pile out of the helo, then they were rising and circling again. By this time Darla and Susan were awake, too. With their young CSS liaison officer they watched spellbound from above as the firefight and its shifting visual Morse code of tracer rounds, punctuated by occasional mortar and grenade bursts—or lit longer by falling starshell flares—eventually spelled out victory for the combined Saudi and CSS forces.

  Their liaison officer took a radio call. He then informed them that the camp had been secured, and the helicopter dropped more slowly toward earth. They leapt the short distance to the sand and ran out from beneath the prop wash—amid the stink of cordite and burning human flesh. One of the other CSS soldiers saluted their liaison. As the helicopter lifted into a holding pattern, both the CSS soldiers led Michael, Susan, and Darla toward first one modular building, then another.

  In the first, CSS guards stood around a small group of frightened men and women, civilians who, under questioning, identified themselves variously as molecular geneticists, biochemists, and bino-or nanotechnicians. All except for one—a defiant woman whom the CSS troops had cut away from the others and were questioning concerning the whereabouts of someone named Avram Zaragosa. Michael thought he recognized the name, and the woman, too. From the ECOL conference. Vida something. A meteoriticist.

  They proceeded into another section of the lab. From some remaining scattered examples still in the lab, Michael, Darla, and Susan confirmed the nature of their work.

  “Were they working with extractions from meteorites?”

  They were startled to hear Dan Amaral say it into the speakers mounted in their helmets. It was the first they had heard from either Amaral or Brescoll since they had left Brescoll’s ECS lair, from which Amaral’s voice was presumably now coming.

  Once past that startlement, Michael and Darla agreed that was indeed what the scientists and techs here were working on. When
Michael asked the clustered scientists under guard where the meteorite samples themselves were, the experts were even more guarded in their responses.

  It took a while, but Michael, Susan, and Darla eventually got them to admit that Victor Fremdkunst—hours earlier—had most of what he’d initially brought to the camp gathered together in front of the lab. Then, at the head of a small caravan of Humvees and ATVs, he and a Russian national, a meteoriticist by the name of Yuri Semenov, had driven off with what appeared to be crates of meteorite specimens, into the desert. Whether his goal was disposal or departure, the scientists and technicians under guard could not, or would not, say.

  Even while gathering that information, they received word that one of the reconnoitering helicopter crews had come across a tarped pile of crates. From the description of the contents, it seemed Fremdkunst and Semenov had left behind a goodly portion of those same meteoritic samples.

  “I’m amazed Fremdkunst would abandon any part of his precious collections,” Michael said.

  “He must have been in a hell of a hurry,” Darla agreed. “Semenov, too.”

  “Either that,” Brescoll informed them from the ECS, far away, “or the craft in which they departed in didn’t have the room, or the lift capacity.”

  “Let’s not make the same mistake ourselves,” Michael said. “We need to get those crates winched up into the helicopter we came in, and pronto.”

  Michael overheard Brescoll and the CSS liaison giving orders to that effect, even as he, Susan, and Darla walked to the next modular laboratory building. Once they entered, Darla immediately recognized a lab setup resembling her own at Rocky Mountain—or the remnant of such a set up, at any rate. She presumed it was Barry Levitch’s lab space, though Barry himself seemed to have departed. Susan and Michael, meanwhile, examined another section of the building, where rather unusual telepresence equipment seemed to have been left behind.