Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  There stood al Hajar al-Aswad itself. The Black Stone. The Right Hand of God. The Navel of the World, in its shining bezel mount. Obscured by crowds turning around it, he could only from moment to moment catch a glimpse of it: pupil at the center of a vertical silver eye, suspended in the midst of a ceremonial hurricane. Silver-horizoned black hole, at the center of a spiral-armed galaxy of human bodies turning.

  Avram felt as if he were weightless in deep space, staring edge-on at a glowing sandstorm of stars, everything turning around that obscured singularity, every grain of sand a star and every star a human soul. The vertiginous fear of what he was at last about to undertake shook him so hard he did not know whether to fall up or to fall down.

  Around him, men and women wept and prayed, prayed and wept, stunned and overcome by the majesty of the sight before them. Avram looked away, rubbing his eyes, trying to steady and calm himself with reassuring memories of what he’d already accomplished. Dimly he saw Mahmoud moving down from the tiered arcade, toward the floor of the great courtyard and its turning mass of humanity.

  When he looked back again, men and women continued to weep and pray, but Avram breathed no easier. The dizzying fear that had gripped him on looking at the Kaaba and its turning crowds was almost overpowering now. He steeled himself against it.

  If I could walk through the Gate of Peace, so far from peaceful in my mind, and still not be struck down, Avram thought, then I will not be struck down.

  He stepped down into the courtyard itself. Looking toward the stone, he said, “Allah, I intend to circle your sacred house. Make the way easy for me and accept my seven circuits in your name.” On the edge of the doughnut-ring of turning pilgrims, he straightened his ihram and raised his hand in saluting the stone. Joining the crowds in their counterclockwise circling, he was surprised how vigorous these first circuits of the tawaf were, even though he knew the Arabic word for the strong pace they set was ramal, which meant “moving the shoulders as if walking in sand.”

  Each time a jostling human circuit completed itself by coming in line with the Stone again, he called out “Allahu akbar!”—“God is great!”—with all the rest. It was not until he had completed the third such circuit, however, that he noticed he was being paced by a modestly dressed woman who, with unexpected assertiveness, grasped him by the shoulder. The mode of her dress was so unfamiliar that he almost didn’t recognize Vida when she spoke to him.

  “Avram, listen to me!” Vida called aloud in English, near his ear, while everyone around them endlessly prayed or exclaimed on the greatness of God in Arabic and myriad other languages. “The NSA—they told me you’ve got an implant in your head. They say it could turn you into a human bomb! Please, stop!

  They don’t know when it’ll happen, or even if it will happen, but for everyone’s sake, don’t go through with this! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  As the motion of the crowd swept him toward the quicker circuits ringing around the Kaaba—on toward the inner field-lines of plasmatized humanity swirling in this vast spiritual-energy tokamak—the madness crashed in upon him. Friends don’t let friends blow up the Kaaba! he thought hysterically—and it was all he could do to keep the laughter from popping the top of his head back like the lid of a foot-pedal trash can. He saw Mahmoud, an eddy in the flux, stopped and glancing over his shoulder, waiting as the flow brought Avram and Vida up beside him.

  “Thanks for giving me the final piece, Vida,” Avram said, as coldly controlled as he could manage. “I do know what I’m doing, now.”

  Moving onward, he saw two very short women—he would have almost said girls—sweep past him, unaccompanied, swift as ice-skaters over the floodlit white marble beneath their feet. Something familiar about them, though he could not put his finger on it, and did not have time to, in any case.

  UNLIKE IN THE MOVIES

  Darla had fired in the direction of Fremdkunst’s and Levitch’s voices, before tucking and rolling as Brescoll’s smart-armor trainers had shown her. Slamming up painfully behind a rock, she cursed quietly at herself. They made it look so damn easy in their brief training—and even easier in the movies!

  She would’ve felt a good deal more confident if she were in fact wearing such armor now. Or if she had “become” smart armor, as Marc had. She squeezed off three more rounds, hoping she had distracted their opponents long enough for Marc to get to work.

  Flashes of automatic weapons fire erupted in the night, followed by the occasional scream or horrible strangulated gurgling sound. Gradually the weapons fire began to subside. After several moments of aching silence, Victor Fremdkunst and Barry Levitch fell at her feet, cast down. Darla switched on her LED headlamp. Behind the two men, a bloody, stone-skinned Marc Vasques stood. He was wearing night-vision infrared goggles.

  “Here, you might need these, now that the kids are gone,” he said, flipping up the bimod binoc goggles and tossing her a pair, too. She nodded. With the kids to guide them, they’d had no problem with the subterranean dark, but with them gone, she and Marc were almost as blind as anyone else in the night.

  “I suspect they thought I’d be easier to kill,” Vasques said quietly. “Bit of a surprise, for them. Once I managed to borrow this night-sight gear, things began to turn our way. Thought you might find these two gents useful. Oh, and one of them had this, too.”

  Into the light shining from her headlamp, a rectangular box about the size of a woman’s handbag came flying. Darla caught it and saw that it was a combination GPS/gravimeter—an expensive handheld model.

  She placed the unit on the rock and unceremoniously smashed it with the rifle butt until it was quite thoroughly broken.

  “What are you doing?” Fremdkunst asked, unable to contain himself any longer.

  “We know where the kids are,” Darla said, nodding her head in the direction of the Mina Valley, beyond the ridge, toward Mecca. “We don’t need to track them.”

  Vasques pulled Levitch and Fremdkunst to their feet.

  “What I want to know,” he said to them, “is why you were so intent on capturing those kids.”

  Neither Levitch nor Fremdkunst volunteered any information. That didn’t much bother Darla, however.

  She figured they’d probably grow more talkative on the long walk to police custody.

  OVERPRESSURE

  Jim Brescoll was so busy with everything happening over Gaza that he barely noticed when Bree Lingenfelter and Steve Wang joined them, moments after Michelson, under guard, had been brought in.

  Had he the time to think about it, he probably would have thought the place was getting quite crowded, since DNI Watson was still in ECS with them too, watching events unfold.

  On his blinks and on the big flatscreens before him, the imagery pumped to Director Brescoll from his analysts in NSOC 3E099 showed Gaza, Israel, and the eastern Med—bird’s-eye and star’s-eye views from NRO surveillance satellites and Aurora overflight aircraft.

  A more topographically stripped-down screen showed radar-tracked air-traffic icons in motion, vectors of aircraft whose simple geometric representations belied the complexities of the situation. This loftier and more abstract data flooding the director’s way was augmented with human-scale sights and sounds, including real-time pilot chatter from Israeli and American aircraft—even pilot camera shots, though patchy and time-delayed.

  Nor were they eyeless in Gaza itself. Through his IDF connections, Dan Amaral, out on the floor of NSOC 3E099, patched them into helmet-cam hookups with Israeli units bordering all the target zones.

  Jim thanked all and whatever gods there might be that none of the aircraft commandeered by the Kahanists had reached any of their targets…so far. Of the two Kahanist-controlled helicopters headed toward Rafah, one had been shot down by Israeli jets. The crew of the other, apparently deciding that they weren’t quite ready to make the ultimate sacrifice, had turned and been forced down in Israeli territory. The commandeered fixed-wing aircraft headed toward al-Bureij had likewise been
destroyed, though by whom was as yet unclear, since it had been struck simultaneously by machine-cannon fire from an Israeli fighter and an air-to-air missile loosed from a navy-version Joint Tactical Fighter from the Lincoln.

  That left only the last commandeered plane, now nearly over An-Nuseirat. Missed entirely by air-to-airs from two Israeli strike fighters, it had, perversely, been hit by an Israeli antiaircraft missile launched from a ground battery. The lumbering plane was undoubtedly damaged and losing altitude. Hit and going down, yes, but that descent was too controlled for Jim’s liking—and still tracking to target. Must have a hell of a pilot on board, Jim thought grudgingly.

  One of the satellites picked it up first: an abrupt bright flash. Even through the sound-damping walls separating the Executive Command Suite from NSOC 3E099, Jim heard a sound much closer than and almost as telling as the flash: the involuntary groan of the personnel in the big room next door.

  For all the powers of command, control, communication, and intelligence of which they were masters, they still had not been able to prevent the strike.

  Amaral came over the line. Brescoll put the call on conference for all in ECS to hear.

  “We have visual confirmation, Jim. It’s An-Nuseirat. Looks like we’ve got a fuel-air detonation at low predetermined altitude. Dead center on the community.”

  Jim took off his blinks and rubbed his eyes. Scenes continued to play over the screens in ECS, all of them confirming the bad news.

  “What was the population density at ground zero?” he asked at last.

  “High,” Amaral said. “It was a refugee camp for years and years. Figure about four thousand people per square kilometer.”

  “Right,” Brescoll said, forcing himself to consider the ramifications. He looked toward Retticker, whose guards (along with Michelson’s) still waited outside the door. Both men were still here because they remained valuable information sources. Might as well use them. “General, any idea on worst-case scenario for damage?”

  Retticker pondered it a moment before speaking.

  “A thousand-pound-per-square-inch overpressure, out to a thousand yards from detonation point.”

  Jim nodded slowly.

  “So, within roughly a square kilometer, no one outside a hardened bunker could have survived. Four thousand dead, as a first estimate.”

  Retticker nodded. Ethan Watson leaned forward.

  “Mister Amaral, you have considerable expertise in the region. What do you believe the Arab and Muslim response will be?”

  “Sir, in the wake of the Temple Mount events, the Iranians and Syrians were already on record saying they would view any mass-destructive Israeli attack on the Palestinians as an attack on all followers of Islam, including the peoples of their own nations.”

  “But the Israeli government forces were clearly trying to stop the attacks!”

  “‘Trying’ is the operative word, sir. The Israeli efforts, and their failure, will likely both be read as a ploy.

  The fact of thousands dead is going to make it difficult for governments in the region to show restraint, even if they were inclined to do so. The rarer action lies in virtue than in vengeance, but that’s probably too rare to be expected here. Too much history already. I think we may be looking at the beginning of a theater nuclear war.”

  Jim turned to Watson.

  “We’ll put our early-warning satellite systems on high alert for flare-ups of missiles leaving silos, or going into suborbital boost phase,” he said. “Heightened surveillance from Syria to Pakistan. Reconnaissance systems tracking the movement of tanks and armored columns through the desert, and planes through the air. South to Arabia and Sudan, west to Morocco.”

  Watson nodded, not happily.

  “Director Brescoll, Mister Amaral—how do you expect the launches themselves to play out, if they do?”

  “Decapitation strikes,” Jim said. Retticker concurred.

  “Launches against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem,” Amaral suggested. “Response against Damascus, Tehran, possibly Karachi. We don’t know exactly how the Arabian peninsula will go. There are added wrinkles if Jerusalem gets hit, too.”

  “Oh?”

  “A strike against the heartland of Western faith…” Amaral said, trailing off. Jim knew what Dan was thinking: the worst kind of synergy between and among Islamofascist, Judeofascist, and Christofascist groups.

  “The Israelis have over two hundred nuclear devices,” Jim admitted. “There are some groups, both there and here, who might view any attack on the historic heart of Judaism and Christianity as sufficient grounds for the destruction of the historic heart of Islam. Turning Riyadh, Jedda, even Mecca, into glass—that might not be beyond the realm of the possible.”

  “If anything happens in Mecca now,” Amaral said, “all bets are off. There are millions of pilgrims from all over the world in Mecca at the moment. A nuclear strike there could quickly escalate to global war.”

  Watson looked up at the imagery still playing over the screens.

  “I’ll confer with the Pentagon. We’ll urge the president to go to highest defense condition. We have no choice in the matter.”

  SORROW, AND HOPE

  Darla and Marc had not marched Victor Fremdkunst and Barry Levitch long or far when Darla was almost bent double by a sudden pang. Marc called them to a halt.

  “You felt it, too?” Marc asked, keeping an eye on both their captives and Darla as she slowly straightened up, then nodded.

  “From the kids,” she said, looking off to the north. “Something very bad has happened. Something that reminds them of what happened to their own people.”

  Marc nodded slowly.

  “Like getting sucker punched by a fist full of deep sadness. Sorrow. I felt it on the tepui, but this was far more powerful.”

  “Regret, too, for not being able to stop it in time.”

  “‘Too late.’ That’s what I felt.”

  “Something else beyond that, though,” Darla said. “Too late for some things, but maybe not too late for everything.”

  Fremdkunst and Levitch looked at them as if they were speaking gibberish, then glanced at each other as if they doubted the sanity of their captors. Marc and Darla prodded them to move on.

  UNCHARACTERISTIC BEHAVIOR

  For Michael and Susan, the wave of sorrow, regret, and pain that seized them coincided with a bright flash like lightning toward the west. George Otis, being marched from a villa south of Jerusalem, burst into praise and laughter at the sight of it.

  “Thank you, Jesus! Praise the Lord! Nothing can stop The Plan now! From its scattered fragments I have reforged the Spear of Destiny in a form more powerful than any yet wielded by human hands!”

  Michael saw Susan eye the man narrowly, anger in her face, and moved to stop her before she did something she might regret later.

  Their own sphere of operations had been going well, up to now. Brescoll and his people at NSA, suspecting that the gravimetric signature they’d discovered might be linked to the Mawari kids, had traced that signal here, to this very location, before it stopped, just over forty-five minutes earlier. Joining the CSS and Mossad troops on this raid, they’d taken little fire before Otis’s MERC bodyguard stood down and surrendered, apparently on Otis’s orders. Now the man himself was in custody, though none of the Mawari kids had been found on the premises.

  Susan was madder—and moving faster—than Michael realized. By the time he caught up to her and, with the help of two soldiers, restrained her, she had already smashed Otis across the face. The blow, from a fist gauntleted in smart armor and augmented by exoskeletal servomotors, would have knocked Otis to the ground had he not been held up by his captors. It was still powerful enough to muss the man’s perfectly coiffed helmet of silver hair more than a little, and leave him bleeding from nose and lip.

  “You pietistic bastard!” Susan shrieked, despite the restraining hands on her. “What in the name of hell have you done? Where are the kids?”

  Her ve
hemence caught Michael by surprise. This wasn’t like her. Why was she doing this?

  With a handkerchief Otis, undaunted, mopped lightly at the blood coming from his nose and upper lip.

  “In the name of hell, nothing,” he said, with a somewhat pained smile. “In the name of heaven, everything.”

  “Let it go, Susan,” Michael said. “Don’t let it make you like him.” She ignored him, still straining against the arms of those who restrained her.

  “No need to worry about that, son,” Otis said. “You people will never understand. God doesn’t rule by ‘consensus.’ God doesn’t believe in ‘democracy’ or ‘diplomatic solutions.’ His Word is law. No Congress of Angels overrides his veto—and He doesn’t negotiate with Satan! The final destruction of the Amalekite House of Esau has begun. Before very much longer the Kaaba and its idolatrous Black Stone will be blasted into dust, one way or another. The Lord has given us the strength to do impossible things!

  We have claimed the spear and solved its secrets! We hold the destiny of the world in our hands! I shall rule this world as its Governor, for God and under God, whose Plan now reveals itself in all its majesty!”

  “The children!” Susan shouted. “What have you done with them?”

  “I gave them to Vang,” he said with a shrug. “I had no need of them anymore. You may look for Ka-dalun and Alii, as they call themselves, with Vang.”

  “Why? Why him?”

  “Not that I need to explain myself to the likes of you,” Otis said, dabbing at his blood as it coagulated and seeming to become belatedly disoriented from the blow he’d suffered, “but I suppose I owed him for some of the operatives he lost. The general and that Russian fellow. Oh, and the crew of that airship, too—the one that got destroyed. And, farther back, for putting me in touch with the strange folks beneath the Tri-Border domes.”