Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Leading them through a city that seemed all roses and gardens and parks breeding exotic wildlife—gazelles and Arabian oryx and the houbara bustard Avram had already hunted through falcon’s eyes—the officer at last brought them to King Fahd Park, with its lake, playgrounds, gazebos, walking paths, and mosque.

  And a small clutch of local media awaiting their arrival, and their words.

  Mahmoud gave interview after interview, and Avram grew more nervous with each one.

  “What are you doing?” Avram asked, pulling him aside in a break between two such question sessions.

  “I’m hiding us in plain sight, my friend,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  And he did see. By evening they were in the papers and on local TV—and hotel managers were offering them lodging free of charge.

  From the newspapers, Mahmoud cut out clippings about their journey. He left Avram, in his stumbling Arabic, to graciously turn down such manager’s offers. Avram/Ibrahim tried to explain that they had grown used to camping under the stars—attempting to live up to some obscure expectation of desert explorers, even as he desperately longed for a hot shower and a night between clean sheets white and cool as folded snow, in a well-made bed, in a high-rise hotel with elevators and room service and maids and bellmen.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Avram said to Mahmoud as they remounted their ATVs in preparation for heading down the Taif-Jeddah Road.

  “Don’t worry!” Mahmoud said, flashing at him a handful of newspaper clippings about their journey.

  “These are almost better than any passport or certificate between here and the Great Mosque in Makkah.”

  The locals they spoke with grew expansive at the mention of the Taif-Jeddah Road. They claimed it was a breathtaking marvel of engineering, passing through rugged mountains, past spectacular vistas—and they also did not neglect to mention that it wound its way around ninety-three hairpin turns, and was especially dangerous to travel after sunset. Which just happened to be precisely the time they left King Fahd Park.

  The ride along the escarpment toward Jeddah out of Taif was indeed spectacular, and spectacularly dangerous in the long shadows of twilight. The only stretch of road Avram had ever seen that remotely compared to it was the Palm to Pines Highway in southern California, which he had driven with a fellow meteoriticist some years back, between a conference at Palomar Observatory and a flight out of the Palm Springs airport. On that trip his American colleague had told him stories of crotch-rocket motorcyclists who had plastered themselves at high speeds onto the trunks of great pine trees along that highway.

  The memory did not instill confidence in him now, for Palm to Pines was a walk in King Fahd Park compared to this escarpment highway. The road under them now seemed to writhe like a head-smashed snake in the falling dark—until Avram was at last able, via shouting and hand gestures, to convince Mahmoud to stop for the night.

  No more than ten minutes after they’d pulled off the road and pitched camp, Mahmoud was sound asleep in his sleeping bag. Avram envied his fellow traveler such dead slumber. After all that had happened that day and all that would likely happen tomorrow, he could use the rest.

  Still, he could not sleep. Taking a seat on a windsculpted rock, he looked up and watched the night sky deepen to astronomical twilight, as dark as the heavens ever get. The glowing sandstorm of the Milky Way hovered above him at the horizon of infinity. From time to time, a grain from that sandstorm, a shooting star, would cut a golden slash across that sky—a rip in the unbounded darkness that healed instantly, leaving no scar behind.

  He thought of his destination and the culmination of his mission. He rubbed the space above the implant at the back of his neck, and wondered at the purpose for which it had actually been put there. He doubted it was as Mahmoud believed: to locate him for rescue, after he somehow managed to snatch the Black Stone of the Kaaba, or at least a piece of it—for truth, science, and the future peace of all humanity. Yet he could bring into the Greatest Mosque no tools or gear for doing that, not even so much as a hammer and chisel, nor a sample bag in which to stow any specimen.

  Avram did not doubt that Luis and his collaborators might have already arranged for delivery of such items, perhaps to be handed over in the very heart of the Great Mosque of Mecca itself. Perhaps that was what the implant was for: for them to find him, to whatever purpose.

  Somehow, though, he doubted it was for that. True, Luis had been keeping him informed on a slim need-to-know basis, but his “control” clearly also did not expect Avram to be stupidly passive, either.

  Luis had dropped enough hints to suggest that his stealing the Black Stone, or a piece of it, was only a feint. Why else bring in someone who had the motive for revenge that Avram had?

  But if the implant was not for them to find him, then what was it for? Some kind of mind-control thing, to goad him on his mission? If so, it wasn’t necessary.

  The fire of revenge had not been burned out of him by his time in the desert. The hot hate of all Muslims that had filled him after Enide’s killing had, however, been tempered by time into a weapon more pure and precise. Having now met and spent time with so many people raised in that faith, he did not see Islam as any more likely to spawn a culture of violence than Judaism, or Christianity, or any other religion—or scientific secularism, for that matter—given the same historical circumstances.

  No, what mattered was that those responsible for his daughter’s death would be on Hajj in Mecca at the same time as himself.

  His purer vengeance had become stronger and more focused the closer to Mecca they got, but he suspected that was his own doing, not the implant’s. Since he’d passed inside the four-day time window and the implant had gone active (if Luis’s timetable was to be credited), he hadn’t noticed any major changes in his thoughts, or his ideas, or his affect. Then again, if the implant was somehow subtly controlling his mind—the very thing he would be using to detect that control—could he ever really know?

  Might the implant be intended to guide him to the person or persons who might facilitate his revenge for what had been done to Enide? Or, conversely, might it guide him to those responsible for his daughter’s death, so that he might personally avenge himself on them?

  The date when he would tick to zero, however, was just too meaningful to that larger world of revenge for it to be coincidental. He had seen the news headlines in the papers from which Mahmoud had clipped the small articles about their exploit. One paper was in English for the tourists, but even his Arabic wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t figure out, from the Arab-language papers, how excruciatingly tense were the relations between Israel and the Islamic world at this juncture. Particularly those with Syria and Iran.

  He had dipped back into the contemporary world long enough today to realize that. Long enough to realize the myriad ways an attack on the Black Stone of the Kaaba, by an Argentinian Jew, could trigger the final conflict too many in the region so devoutly desired.

  Maybe his implant was some sort of ground targeting for a missile strike on the Kaaba itself? Or something even more immediately fatal?

  He smiled sadly at the thought that his Jewishness might be part of that apocalypse-triggering event. He had never been religious, nor had his parents before him. He was no more devoutly Jewish than Vida Nasr was devoutly Muslim, or Victor Fremdkunst devoutly Christian. Nor was he so devoutly secularist as Mahmoud claimed to be.

  He thought of who and what he had seen that day. The city of Taif had been so beautiful after the long desert that he thought Vida must have been wrong, that cities must be more than just the desert domesticated. Their escort, too, so proud of that same city.

  A pity that it might all be destroyed and returned wild desert once again.

  Looking up at the stars, he thought of all the wars waged in the name of various gods. He thought of how infinitely inventive were the sciences in creating new means of destruction. The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. That was w
hat Victor had said in another context.

  To impose our designs upon heaven, but make heaven responsible for imposing those designs upon us—that was all too human a thing to do. The problem lay not so much in what people believed as in the fact that it was people—flawed, imperfect, metaphysically malcoded—doing the believing.

  It took all the houses of humanity, all the constellations and consternations of its sciences and religions and cultures and politics, to turn a young girl, along with herself, into a suicide bomber. To have that suicide bomber turn another young girl into blasted fragments of mere meat. To reduce his daughter to that phantom limb that still pressed against his chest with a weight far greater than flesh.

  Avram looked up at the glowing sands of the endless desert hanging above his head. Maybe only a newer and bigger holocaust can teach us to behave better, he thought.

  Let the storm of the stars we have made come down on all of us, in a great shattering blast. I will play my part. I will have my revenge, consequences and collateral damage be damned. Maybe this time we will learn our lesson so well that we will never have to learn anything more, ever again.

  TEN

  SILVER LINING

  Michael woke to the sound of gunfire and explosions. Glancing toward Susan’s cot, he saw in the dim light that she was also awake.

  “What now?” she asked.

  What indeed. So much had happened. The downing of their CSS-crewed helicopter while pursuing the stealth airship. The damaging of that same airship by the sand-and-stone man. The disappearance of him, Darla, Aubrey, and Ebu into the sands. The arrival, soon thereafter, of MERC troops and Otis, who had left the bound-and-gagged helo crew survivors behind and taken aboard their helicopters Michael and Susan as prisoners, and Ka-dalun and Alii as…something else.

  The helicopters that transported them apparently never left Saudi airspace as near as Michael could tell.

  They were transferred then to trucks, and it was not until they at last came to a stop that Michael had any good idea where they were.

  He and Susan were marched out of the trucks toward one temporary building, while Ka-dalun and Alii were marched in a different direction, toward another. The crater-rimmed terrain, the similarity of the temporary structures here to what they’d seen at Wabar, what he knew of Victor Fremdkunst’s work in trying to connect meteoritic impacts to stories of ancient destruction—from all these Michael guessed they were most likely at a work site beside the Little Crater, south of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.

  And so they had been for nearly two days, worrying about the Mawari kids, wondering what might become of all of them. The only silver lining to the thunderhead above them was the fact that he and Susan, in the midst of the extremity of their situation, had begun to realize again how much they needed each other and genuinely cared for each other—something the whirl of events had prevented for too long.

  The gunfire and percussive whump of small explosions grew closer now. The door of their building smashed open hard enough on its hinges to strike and rebound off the wall to which it was attached. Men in black combat fatigues and night-vision gear entered crouching, guns drawn, taking up positions along the walls. He and Susan stood shocked, but not so shocked that they didn’t raise their hands above their heads.

  The strike team shouted to each other in a language Michael didn’t really understand but guessed might be Hebrew. Apparently they were declaring the place clear and secured. An instant later a man came in without crouching and strode toward Susan and himself.

  “Michael Miskulin? Susan Yamada?” the man asked, mispronouncing both their names, although not so unrecognizably that he and Susan didn’t know he meant them. “Follow me, please.”

  The man who had accosted them by name led them out onto a sandy and rocky flat space where sights of fire and smells of smoke and detonated explosives filled the air. He saw places where others—civilians and military prisoners—were being herded into separate groups. Passing some of the other civilians standing or walking under guard, he thought he recognized one of them as Jeremy Michelson, the telepresence scientist Brescoll had showed them in photos.

  Beyond the man he saw other troops, and beyond all of them he could see where rocks like snarled teeth jutted into the star-filled sky, the broken rim of what might or might not have been a meteor crater—the jury was still out, he knew, despite all of Fremdkunst’s work.

  Michael guessed the soldiers were Mossad or Israel Defense Forces, but a moment later he realized not all of them fit that category. Ahead he saw a CSS officer he recognized, who approached them.

  “Doctor Yamada, Doctor Miskulin,” the officer said, holding a connection helmet for each of them. “The director would like a word with you.”

  Somewhat reluctantly, he and Susan put on the helmets and were immediately linked to Director Brescoll, in his Executive Command Suite, far off in Crypto City.

  “Susan. Michael. Glad to have you back among us. Looks like our guess as to your location proved right after all.”

  “What about Ka-dalun and Alii?” Susan asked. “They were brought in with us.”

  “No, we haven’t recovered them as of yet. Imagery from satellites and reconnaissance drones indicates two vehicles departed your location something less than an hour ago. One was headed north, the other south.”

  “Which one do we follow,” Michael asked, “to find the kids?”

  “Good to hear you’re interested in taking on that job. Saves me the trouble of asking you to consider suiting up in smart armor again. We’re sending you north. To Jerusalem.”

  “Why there?”

  “Partly because of things two of the people from Wabar—Vida Nasr and Yuri Semenov—have told us about the Temple Mount. Also because we think we may be picking up an interesting gravimetric signature, moving north. It may be from the two Mawari children who were being held in that same camp with you.”

  THE HEART’S TURBULENCE

  It was along the Taif-Jeddah Escarpment Road that Avram had begun to notice the road signs with the title “al-Mukarramah”—“the Ennobled”—attached to the name of Mecca. Not too far along the ring road to Mecca he noticed other signs, most prominently those reading “Stop for Inspections—Entry Prohibited to Non-Muslims.” At the first of these checkpoints, the soldiers who stepped from their kiosk beside the road diligently checked their papers. Out of curiosity the soldiers had also looked over their sandblasted and battered ATVs. That was just the opening Mahmoud had needed to tell them the story of their desert crossing and show them the newsclippings from the Taif papers covering their exploit, as proof.

  It seemed one of the soldiers must have radioed to the checkpoints ahead, along the rest of their roundabout route, for from then on their papers were barely looked at. They were either waved through, saluted, given the thumbs-up sign, or at most asked to tell the tale of their journey again. By the time they left their ATVs in the proud keeping of the soldiers at a final checkpoint (to await their return) Avram had almost expected to be carried on the shoulders of pilgrims to the Great Mosque itself.

  They had, instead, joined pilgrims in a van that shot along through sun-baked and treeless ridges of the Hijaz. His fears that coverage in the Taif press might give them away now seemed unfounded. Passing under a giant concrete Koran the size of a freeway overpass, he and Mahmoud chanted with their fellow pilgrims the Talbiyya, which Avram thought of as the Prayer of Readiness: “I am here to serve you, Allah!

  Here I am! I am here because you are incomparable. Here I am! Praise, blessings, and the kingdom belong only to you. Nothing compares to you.”

  In the van they at last came into the high valley amid the mountains where the lights of Mecca shown before them in the twilight. A constellation of earthbound stars sloshed up toward one rim of the granite bowl in which the city nestled. Amid a great throng of fellow pilgrims, he and Mahmoud made their long way on foot up Umm al-Qura Road, past the point where motor vehicles were banned, to look down at last on t
he enormous key-shaped Great Mosque glowing under floodlights, the crowds turning their labyrinthine circuits in the head of that key. Climbing stairs, they entered the Haram via the Bab al Salaam, the Gate of Peace. Leaving their sandals at the threshold and stepping right-foot-first across it, they chanted with their fellow pilgrims the ritual greeting: “This is your sanctuary, this your city, this your servant. Peace is yours, you are salvation. Grant us salvation and guide us through the gates of Paradise.”

  They passed through the pillared halls, long galleries and arcades filled with acres of pilgrim prayer-groups and families from all over the planet, sitting on carpets reading the Koran, or praying, or conversing. The air that had been still and stifling was now moved by a swift breeze. As they rested, Avram felt the marble pillar beneath his hand grow cooler to his touch.

  The winds were changing, but in what direction? He only hoped no one could see the turbulence in his heart—and that, to everyone around him, his mounting anxiety and apprehension would be indistinguishable from religious intensity.

  ALL HORROR’S EVE

  Sitting atop a ridge in the Hijaz as the sun went down, Darla watched as the lights of Mecca and the Mina Valley began to rise into the sky. Each glow from below was a star in the constellation of the Hajj.

  The floodlights of the Great Mosque, there to the west. The shrine at Mina, nearly due north. Muzdalifah, to the northeast. Across the Plain of Arafat, to the tent city near the Mount of Mercy—and the Mosque of Nimira, closer to the foot of this southern range.

  She was so caught up in contemplating the stars as they came out in the sky and on the earth that she almost didn’t notice Marc Vasques approaching her in the twilight, dressed in the thawb he had pilfered from the camp of a sleeping Bedouin. He was coming from the direction where Aubrey and Ebu sat, dressed already in what they called their ihram attire, or “the clothing of the next life”—however it was they knew that. They sat facing each other, communing, Darla knew, with their now distant age-mates, Ka-dalun and Alii.