The second squad ran inside the airship. A moment later they returned, their commander reporting to Otis on the damages the craft had sustained.
McGuire’s sidewise glance at him lengthened.
“General,” Otis said, tonguing a toothpick in his mouth, “you and your folks sit tight while we go see what happened to the people in that helicopter that was following you. Victor here says those poor escaped children might be over there where that helo went down, too. We’ve only got so much room, I’m afraid, but don’t worry. We’ll send someone after you. In the meantime, I suggest you take cover in that invisiblimp of yours.”
With that, George Otis turned on his heel and headed toward the helicopter from which he’d so recently emerged, taking Michelson, Levitch, and Fremdkunst with him. The MERC troops covered their retreat.
As the helicopter lifted off, Retticker glanced at McGuire and Semenov, to his left and right respectively.
He made no move to follow Otis’s suggestion, however.
“Looks like there’s been a parting of the ways.”
“How do you mean?” Semenov asked.
“If I’m not mistaken, Yuri, all of us who’ve been left behind worked for Doctor Vang. Including you.”
Realization began to dawn on Semenov’s face, as he figured out what Retticker had already surmised.
The allegiances of Fremdkunst, Levitch, and Michelson had been to Otis all along.
“I think I’d better go see what the hell they were talking about with the GPS,” McGuire said, turning toward the downed airship. His two fellow crew members turned with him and began to trudge through the sand, back toward the downed stealthship.
“Slow up a bit on that, Mister McGuire.”
“General?”
“Not so fast. Just wait a bit. If I’m right, we’ll soon see.”
Moments later, a flashbomb went off in the vicinity of the airship.
“What the hell was that?”
“A focused electromagnetic pulse bomb, I believe,” Retticker said, after another long moment. “Saw one demonstrated at Camp Pendleton, once upon a time. I’d be willing to wager most of our electronics are as good as scrap right about now. All GPS locators, all avionic sys—”
A second, much louder blast sent them all diving for the ground. When they looked up again from embracing the desert, they saw that the downed airship had been reduced to burning rubble.
Retticker stood with the others. Slowly. In the shadeless desert.
“Gentlemen,” he said at last, “from his ‘suggestion,’ I believe that was the end George Otis intended for us. We’re on our own from here on out.”
Retticker and the men decided to trek over the desert, toward what remained of the downed helicopters.
Given how thoroughly their stealth ship had been destroyed, they figured they’d have better luck being spotted by search-and-rescue teams at that location. Their pursuers, after all, had not been hiding from the world. They must have been in contact with someone beyond the great sand sea.
BROAD WINK OF THE MIND
Michael and Susan sat on the sand, not far from the wreckage of the helo they’d once flown aboard.
Both of them were still trying to wrap their minds around what the children had done, when the brecciated man came and did what he did. They had by no means yet managed to make full sense of any of that before Darla, Ebu, Aubrey, and the breccia-skinned man, with only the most perfunctory of farewells, waded into the sand and vanished beneath the desert.
Alii and Ka-dalun had been left behind with them, but the kids hadn’t been inclined to explain very much.
The adults’ confusion only intensified when a brace of helicopters came gyring in out of the late afternoon light. Landing on tires that swiveled and ballooned into sand pontoons, the two helos disgorged troops who, guns drawn, quickly surrounded them.
From their uniforms and insignia, Michael recognized them as private security troops of something called Military Executive Resource Corporation. Once the surviving CSS helo crew members had been bound and gagged by the MERC troops as part of their securing the landing zone, a silver-haired man strode confidently toward them.
“Uncle George! Uncle George!” shouted Ka-dalun and Alii, breaking away from Susan and Michael and running toward the silver-haired man. Just as the man, with an immense smile, gathered the two youngsters into his arms and stared over their shoulders at Michael and Susan, Michael recognized him.
George Otis. Michael and Susan stood some distance away, but they could not help overhearing what the kids were saying—and they could scarcely believe what they were hearing.
“Thanks for sending us information on shooting stars, Uncle George!” Ka-dalun said happily. “And the End Times, too!” Alii added. As the two children turned with “Uncle George” and headed back toward the helo from which he’d come, their “Uncle” regaled them with the news that he’d brought with him spears from Vienna and Rome, Armenia and Antarctica.
Michael glanced at Susan, who looked as stunned as he felt. Prodded by their guards, they followed in the direction in which the children and Otis were walking.
That was what puzzled Michael most. He knew something of the abilities the Mawari kids possessed. He had seen them himself. Surely they could have disappeared into the sand like their fellows, or evaded capture in some other way? But they had done nothing. Instead, they had run shouting and laughing into the arms of George Otis.
“Maybe Darla Pittman was right,” Michael muttered to Susan. “Maybe the kids are out for revenge.” No sooner had Susan shaken her head no, and nodded toward the kids, than it was as if someone had flashed a broad wink into his mind.
The children weren’t even looking at him, yet he felt this odd reassurance could only have come from them. If so, what was their game plan? What were they trying to do? As he and Susan were taken as prisoners for transport aboard one of Otis’s helicopters, Michael found it more than a little difficult to predict how the future might unfold.
CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE
Darla Pittman, Marc Vasques, Aubrey, and Ebu came up out of the sand at civil twilight, the twilight of color. Civil twilight was turning into nautical twilight, the twilight of shadows, when the two girls, each carrying a knife taken from the crash site, approached Darla and Marc with them.
“Give me your right hand, please,” Aubrey said to Marc. Ebu said the same to Darla. Both adults did as asked. Simultaneously the girls slashed open the palm of each adult’s right hand—deeply, until the blood flowed. Almost before the pain of what had just happened could fully register with the adults, the girls placed Darla’s and Marc’s bloody palms together, pressing them surprisingly hard palm to palm, mingling their blood as if in some ceremony of bonding or kinship.
“What was that all about?” Vasques asked, staring at the spot of coagulating blood, where Aubrey had somehow managed to find a chink in his stony armor.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Darla answered—and it was true, for the children had already walked away, and were not telling.
PRETERITION
Retticker, Semenov, and the stealthship crew slogged and paused and slogged again, over dune and flat, through evening into night into morning. Through it all, Retticker’s mind pinballed repeatedly over the same table, bouncing against the bumpers of betrayal, the flippers of Otis’s active malevolence and Vang’s not-so-benign neglect. The lowest basin of attraction that his mind always returned to, however, and which always rocketed his thoughts back up to the top of the table, for yet another go-round, was the image of the sand-and-stone man taking aim and firing at their stealth craft.
Was it him? Had Vasques somehow survived? Had the man he had left to die in the desert come back to haunt him? That pebbled sphinx on the target monitors, who seemed afraid of nothing, was he the final preterit product—grown from tepui meteorite mushroom-stone and years of supersoldier research?
Did Otis know? Everyone presumed Vasques was dead. Michelson and L
evitch might have recognized the brecciated man, and Otis had taken the two scientists with him. Those two, however, had not been with Retticker on the flight deck of the stealth ship when the sphinx came awalking and ashooting. So it was quite possible that only Retticker knew the true identity of the “desert camouflaged” soldier who had shot down their airship.
In the midst of such thoughts, they came in sight of the helicopter crash zones. No sooner had the small band of heat-exhausted men reached the area of the downed birds, however, than they spotted a heavy-lift helicopter coming their way.
Those aboard the helo must have spotted them, too, for it began to gyre in on their position. Soon it was hovering before them, disgorging troops from its belly who leapt and lined down to the sand.
The troops shouted to one another, and he recognized phrases in Arabic. So did McGuire, who drew his fifty-caliber handgun from its holster and held it, in casual but ready fashion, beside his leg. As the troops approached, Retticker recognized CSS insignia. The helo was jointly crewed by CSS and Saudi personnel.
“Put away that elephant gun, Mac,” Retticker said. “It’s over. For us, anyway.”
Retticker slowly raised his hands above his head.
TWO OLD FIGHTERS
Jim Brescoll sat alone behind his desk at NSA. The day shift at Crypto City had long ago left for the evening. He rubbed his eyes and soldiered on, as this day joined the several others that had passed, all too eventfully, since he’d last gotten a decent night’s sleep.
Not only were the exact locations of the Mawari kids and Avram Zaragosa still unknown, but Pittman, Yamada, and Miskulin had gone missing, too. About the only good breaks he’d gotten were the recovery of the surviving members of the CSS helo crew—bound and gagged, it was true—and the rescue and capture of Retticker, Semenov, and the airship crew.
Sleep-deprived he was, and sleep-deprived he would likely continue to be. His CSS people were still in Saudi, hospitalized for observation. Taken into custody, Retticker, Semenov, and the airship crew had been transported to the United States as expeditiously as possible.
It was a somewhat bedraggled and jet-lagged Joe Retticker who had finally been brought before him for “debriefing.” There they had sat, two old fighters, alternately coworkers and opponents, both punch-drunk with exhaustion.
If Jim was to believe Retticker’s story, he and Semenov and the crew had been betrayed by George Otis to suffer a fiery fate in the desert. As to why that had happened, Retticker would only suggest that those who had been left to die had been Vang’s people, while those who had been rescued—Fremdkunst, Levitch, and Michelson, in particular—had been Otis’s creatures. No honor among thieves, Jim thought, even as he kept that thought to himself.
Retticker’s own situation—as “material witness” if not prisoner—had at first made the man rather terse and taciturn in his responses to Jim’s further queries. Initially, the general couldn’t or wouldn’t speculate exactly how Zaragosa fit in, or where he or the Mawari kids might be right now, or what their roles might turn out to be in the developing situation. His persistent caginess won Jim’s grudging admiration. Even tethered to the stake, Retticker was one old bear who was not going down without a fight.
Gradually, though, the depths of Retticker’s anger at being betrayed—at Otis, and even at Vang—provided Jim an opening. Slowly they hammered out a deal, in which Retticker would tell what he knew in exchange for Brescoll’s guarantee of protection.
Before long, Retticker had confirmed what Brescoll had already expected: that the Mawari children seemed to have developed extremely unusual powers before their escape. Retticker also volunteered the idea that NSA might want to try tracking at least the kids via gravimetric analysis.
Jim knew well that to get information, one sometimes also had to give information. He revealed to the general the potential uses the Mawari kids might make of their powers. He also told the general of Zaragosa’s daughter, Enide, who had been killed by a suicide bomber while father and daughter had been touring Israel with a meteorite exhibition. He confided to Retticker, too, the possibility that Zaragosa might be motivated by the desire to avenge his daughter’s death—perhaps in a spectacular manner.
Retticker nodded thoughtfully at that, before responding.
“All I knew was that he’s a meteoriticist,” he said. “No one told me all this other history, but it makes sense in the context of the larger picture.”
“What picture is that?” Jim asked.
“Revenge. I did some focused thinking as we were making our way through the desert. The prospect of dying concentrates your thoughts, that way.”
“And?”
“And I remember some things Fremdkunst in particular said. I think I can tell you the date, time, and location toward which all the covert work at Wabar was tending, if not the nature of the mission itself.”
Jim sat up straighter in his chair at that.
“So when and where, then?”
“Mecca is where. The Kaaba in the Great Mosque. ‘When’ is nine Dhul Hijja. Check it on your computer to see what date it corresponds to this year on the Western calendar.”
Jim did so. The date was only days away.
“September eleven.”
“Precisely, Director. How better to let everyone know the patience of your long, slow revenge, than to coldly accomplish it on the date of that particular anniversary, a decade and a half after the original event?”
“But who? Whose revenge?”
“Many people might be candidates. Personally, I suspect George Otis most of all.” He heard the anger kindling in Retticker’s voice, which the general quickly managed to rein in. “Then again, I may just be biased.”
This time it was the director’s turn to nod thoughtfully, as he considered the implications. The death of Otis’s nephew—the young man many had considered to be his heir apparent—on September 11, 2001, was an association between the man and date well known even to the most casual observers of American political culture.
“Otis’s revenge, Zaragosa’s revenge,” Brescoll said. “Perhaps the Mawari kids’ revenge, too. For what happened to their people.”
“Maybe,” Retticker said with a slow nod. “But what happened to their tribe had no initial connection to the Middle East. Believe me, I know. Otis told me he thought those kids were part of God’s Plan, but it was Doctor Vang who was always more interested in them. For Otis, I think the kids were mainly part of God’s Plan B, at most.”
“God’s Plan B?”
“Maybe provide a cover story for what is really going on. Or, you mentioned scenarios for the possible applications of their capabilities. Perhaps Otis might still want to use them to drop a big rock onto a city, in such a way as to make it look like a nuclear attack. If they could do that, and if that were needed.”
“Needed? For what?”
“Armageddon. Rapture. Apocalypse. The final nuclear showdown, where everybody gets to use all the nukes we’ve been sitting on for so long.”
Brescoll remembered verses in Revelation he hadn’t thought of in years.
“Stars falling to earth like late fruit from a fig tree shaken by the wind,” he said. “The great star Wormwood blazing like a torch as it falls from the sky. The much anticipated fulfillment of prophecy, by making the prophecy self-fulfilling.”
“Yes. The fallen star given the key to the shaft of the abyss. George Otis knows those Scripture passages quite well, I’m sure. But I got the sense, at first, that Otis was just humoring Victor Fremdkunst when it came to some of the meteorite stuff—just stringing Victor along, in case some of the falling-star stuff did prove to be important. To get and keep Vang’s money and Tri-Border connections on board, too.”
“I thought you said he took Fremdkunst along with him, when he left you behind.”
“He did. MERC is one of his companies, and it’s been involved in supersoldier R and D almost as long as I have. Maybe he thinks what Victor has discovered will be valuable
to him and MERC, after all.”
Retticker paused, as if he might say more on that, only to change the subject instead. “But I don’t think falling stars are how The End will begin.”
“Something in Mecca?” Jim suggested.
“That scenario was war-gamed long before Otis ever considered it,” Retticker said. “But yes. Mecca.
Either before, or after, or simultaneously with something going down on the Palestinians. In Gaza would be my guess.”
“What kind of something?”
“Fuel-air bombing. Some type of aerosolized fuel-cloud with secondary detonations. Blast and shock-wave overpressures like a nuke, but with less fire and no radioactivity.”
Jim whistled softly through his teeth. He tried to get Retticker to say more on that—his own connections in the Israeli Defense Forces? Otis’s connections there?—but Retticker would contribute nothing further.
The interview was at an end.
“General, for your protection, I’m assigning you to our Crypto City town jail,” he told Retticker. “Our Special Operations Unit oversees it. I once spent some time there myself, during the Kwok-Cho affair.
It’s not so bad.”
Retticker nodded. They both stood.
“I’ll have to be content with that, then. I’ll be more content, though, if you nail that bastard Otis.”
“We’ll do our best.”
Then Retticker was gone, without saying any more. What he’d already said had been enough, at any rate.
Enough to make the director send out a flurry of messages to the Pentagon, to State, to the Israeli embassy and the IDF liaison. He gave all of them the heads-up on a fuel-air bomb scenario and suggested heightened security around all fuel-air munitions. He particularly warned the IDF liaison to have the Israel Defense Forces keep an eye out for rogue elements in its own ranks—Kahanists, or other extremists who might have Christian Zionist or Dominionist connections.
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