As Reg and his crew were piling out of their truck, they were surrounded by children trying to sell them things. Yossi pushed them aside as he moved past on his way to the Saudi headquarters. The others did the same. The last ones out of the truck were Tye and Sutton.
Sutton hesitated before wading into the mob of dirty children. He looked back and saw that Tye had taken out the amber medallion and was examining it for the umpteenth time.
“Will you quit fiddling with that blasted thing and let’s go?” He jumped to the ground, and the children immediately swarmed around him, showing him wristwatches and sunglasses for sale. They tugged on his clothing, shouting, “This very good, this very cheap.” Sutton roared angrily at them to get away, and they shrank from him in fear.
“For Pete’s sake, man, they’re just kids.” Tye hopped out of the truck and waved hello. In a flash, the little salesmen were on him, pushing and shouting and shoving their wares into his face.
“My name Mohammed,” said the tallest boy. He had dark eyes and the wispy beginnings of a mustache. His skin was as dark as Remi’s. He slid an arm around Tye’s waist. “I am your friend. You come with me the shop my cousin. Very good merchandise, very good price.”
“I’ve got a friend named Mohammed. Did anyhow. Sorry, boys,” he announced. “I’m broke. Me no money.” Of course, that wasn’t quite true. He had a thick wad of Saudi riyals, the equivalent of five thousand American dollars, stuffed into his undershorts.
Even though the kids were pushy, Tye couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. They were scrawny and dirty and looked like they didn’t live anywhere in particular. One boy caught the tall Englishman’s attention. All he had to sell were some old magazines. He opened one of them for Tye’s inspection and held it toward his face. Just when they were letting Tye go his way, Sutton bolted back toward them and grabbed one of the oldest boys by the scruff of the neck, then shook him. “Sutton, what are you doing?”
“You little sneak,” Sutton yelled at the kid, walking him roughly over to Tye. “Give it back to him.” The boy, Mohammed, was terrified, crying and pleading with Sutton in Arabic.
“You’re scaring the hell out him, man. Let him go.”
“He’s faking it,” Sutton said. He shook the boy again and told him to quit crying or he’d call the Saudi soldiers over. “Thief get hand chop chop.” Realizing Sutton wasn’t going to fall for his act, Mohammed snapped out of it and straightened up.
“I no t’ief. You drop this one.” He opened his hand and showed Tye the amber medallion he’d taken from Tye’s pocket.
“Well that’s interesting,” Tye said, bending over to study the disk. “It’s working again. Can I have my handkerchief, please.”
“I no take—” When he began to protest, Sutton twisted the collar tighter around his throat. Mohammed pulled out the handkerchief and handed it over. Tye lifted the disk away from the boy’s palm and it went blank again. He put it back down, and it lit up again.
“Isn’t that queer?” Deciding it probably wasn’t dangerous, he set it in his own palm. It worked again. He looked up at the pickpocket and smiled. “Thanks. I think you figured it out.” Sutton turned him loose, but only after planting a hard kick in the seat of his pants. The boys all cursed them as they walked away to join the other pilots.
They found the rest of the squad standing around the village’s post office, directly under the radio tower. Lookouts had climbed to the top of the twenty-story structure to keep a watch for any unwanted visitors. The soldiers who had escaped from the illfated photo session at the crash site had a grim tale to tell. Nearly everyone had been killed. The aliens took a number of additional casualties, but the battle had been a one-sided rout. After surrounding them, the chariots had moved in and systematically hunted the humans down. There had been several cases of “brain torture,” an interrogation technique. Reg knew exactly what they were talking about, having suffered through it himself. The tanks had done almost no damage because the alien pulse blasts shorted out their electrical systems, and the Saudi Air Force couldn’t get close enough to give effective air support. It was, in short, a slaughter.
Ali and Khalid were given assault rifles, but the soldiers refused to issue weapons or ammunition to any non-Saudis. They did, however, introduce Khalid to the town’s leading merchant, an old woman in a traditional Bedouin dress and a black cloth wrapped around her leathery brown face. When Khalid asked if she had any ammunition, she squinted at his weapon.
“What is that?” she asked. “A Kalashnikov? I think I can help you. Do you have any money?”
Remi took out the envelope he’d been handed during the ceremony and tossed it to Khalid. “Buy the store,” he said.
Khalid Yamani was used to handing out large sums of cash, not receiving them. He chuckled and said he’d bring Remi plenty of change, then started following the old woman toward her store.
“Always go in groups,” Miriyam said. She pointed at-Sutton and told him to go with Khalid.
Sutton didn’t appreciate her tone of voice. “Yes, sir!” he said, and gave her a sarcastic salute before leaving.
“Why did you bring that guy?” Yossi asked when Sutton was gone. “He is a pain in the ass.”
“You noticed that, too, eh?”
After a while, the heat drove them toward the shade of the oasis’s palm grove, where the temperature was twenty degrees cooler. As in many oasis towns, the actual springs at Qal’at Buqum were buried under concrete and surrounded by barbed wire. The pools of dark water babbling beneath the trees were all man-made and supplied by underground pipe. There were picnic benches, trash cans, and brick ovens for family barbecues. Scores of refugees from the cities had taken up residence in this shady park, living mostly out of the backs of their cars. Some of them wandered over to speak with the multinational squad of pilots when the sound of automatic gunfire came from overhead. The men perched in the radio tower were firing at something and shouting to the soldiers standing in the square below. The white flashes of an alien pulse weapon tore through the air and smashed into the radio tower, sending the lookouts plummeting to their deaths. The civilians hit the deck as Reg and his crew ran back toward the square. The destructive pulse bursts were coming from inside a walled compound just across the town’s only road.
Reg found the ranking Saudi officer hiding in the bushes beside the post office. He and his men had already devised a plan to surround the compound. Before Reg could talk to them, they took off, running in crouches.
“Don’t these bastards have anything better to do than follow us around?” Sutton asked, gesturing toward the alien hiding place. He and Khalid were back from their shopping spree and started passing out magazines full of cartridges.
“We should follow them,” Khalid said, watching the soldiers advance. They had reached the edge of the road without incident. Making it across was going to be another matter.
When Miriyam stood up to survey the situation, a pulse blast tore into the front wall of the post office, only inches from her head. It didn’t seem to bother her much. She squatted and conferred with Reg. “It looks like there’s only two of them over there.”
“They like to start small,” Reg said, “then rush in and hit you from all sides.”
She turned around and looked into the parklike oasis, thinking the same thing Reg was thinking. “If they get into these trees,” she said, “they’ll be able to drive us out into the open.”
“We’ve got to split up and defend the perimeter.”
“You’re right. Three groups of three.” She pointed at Tye and Ali. “You and you, follow me.” Then she turned and hurried along the wall, leading the group toward the rear of the post-office building. From there, they headed off in different directions.
Reg, Remi, and Khalid ended up together. They jogged through the trees, keeping alert for signs of danger. As they passed campsites, Khalid shouted to the people in Arabic, warning them of the possible danger. Reg stopped and took a long look around.<
br />
“If you were an alien,” he asked, “which way would you come?”
“Wherever there’s no people to shoot at me,” Remi answered.
Khalid disagreed. “They are hunters. They will go where they can kill.”
Through the trees they spotted the shell of a long, narrow, abandoned building. The doors, roof, and windows were all missing. It had become a temporary home to several families of refugees. There was laundry hanging on the bushes nearby and the smoke of a cooking fire, but otherwise no signs of life.
“That’s it,” said Reg, and the three of them ran to reach the spot, splashing through a knee-deep pond that stood in their path. They could feel the presence of the enemy before they heard the moaning that came from inside the walls of the structure.
“Look over there in the bushes,” Remi said. Two bodies, a man and a woman, lay flat on their backs with blood coming from their ears, eyes, and noses. Their eyes were wide-open, as if the last thing they’d seen had surprised them.
Reg heard a gasping, shuddering noise that sounded like someone being electrocuted. He led the way to the building, put his back against the wall, and edged toward an open window. Reg grabbed Khalid’s arm and gave him a piece of advice. “Let’s don’t do anything crazy here. We’ve got to stay alive if we’re going to kill them.” He knew his friend sometimes couldn’t distinguish between bravery and recklessness. But the warning fell on deaf ears. Khalid went straight to the window and looked inside. What he saw made him recoil in horror.
One of the aliens was kneeling in a doorway with the tentacles of his biomechanical suit holding three separate victims pinned to the floor. There were two children and a woman, their bodies convulsing in pain as the alien interrogated them mentally. Khalid screamed at the thing and opened fire. He sent a sustained volley of gunfire in through the window. The creature reacted by shuffling backwards into the next room, dragging one of the children with it. Khalid leapt inside and ran to the doorway. A pulse blast sliced through it and exploded against the far wall, nearly taking Khalid’s handsome face with it.
The inside of the structure was a labyrinth of decayed walls and leaning doorways. By the time Reg and Remi climbed inside, the creature had retreated deeper into the building, dragging the child with it. Khalid bolted through the doorway into the next room and was immediately surrounded by pulse blasts. Despite the danger, Reg and Remi followed him in.
Dodging the explosions, they followed the sounds of the alien through two more doorways. Khalid was about to step through the third when Remi held him back. They listened. The sound of sporadic gunfire was coming from several places in the oasis. During the spaces of silence, they could hear the child’s labored breathing on the other side of the nearest wall. Remi pointed into the next room. It was waiting for them.
When Khalid peeked around the corner, there was a loud crunch, then something flew out of the doorway. It was the child’s body, a girl about nine years old. She slid down a wall and landed in a broken heap. Reg thought Khalid would rush into the room, looking for revenge. Instead, he kept his cool. “There’s a window behind him. You keep him busy, and I’ll surprise him from outside.” The men nodded as Khalid hurried back the way they’d come.
Reg and Remi kept their weapons trained on the doorway as the harsh sun beat down on them through the open roof. Then Reg pulled Remi closer to the wall and pointed up. He could give the murderous invader something else to think about by firing a few shells over the top. But as Remi was boosting him up, Reg lost his sense of balance. A strange sensation moved through him, a sensation he recognized as the presence of an alien mind.
As his Ethiopian comrade looked on in confusion, Reg sank to the floor, grimacing in anguish. The creature was reaching through the wall to infiltrate Reg’s mind. A cramping pain shot through him, as if his body was a pincushion pierced by freezing cold needles. As quickly as it began, Reg knew there was only one way to make it stop. He had to tell everything he knew, had to open his memory to the intelligent presence inside him. And he did. At the alien’s command, he conjured up the mental image of the post office and the Saudi soldiers trying to get across the road, then he “remembered” something he’d never seen before: a view from inside the compound, looking out at the post office and the radio tower, and as fast as he could think it, he was identifying the directions the soldiers would come from, then he was huddled in the bushes listening to Miriyam say, “three groups of three,” and running toward the back of the building and splitting up. The pain and the rapid series of images running through his mind confused him, made him feel the need to show the alien everything it wanted to see. And then he was showing himself, sending an image of him and Remi huddled at the base of the wall. And the third one, where is the third one? It wanted to know about Khalid, and, for the first time, Reg resisted the thing’s power, tried to deny it, but the memory-images were coming out of him in an unstoppable stream. He pictured Khalid running back through the tangle of walls toward the empty window frame. He tried to stop thinking, tried to take back control of his mind, desperate not to betray his friend, but found himself imagining Khalid running along the outside wall toward the alien’s hiding place. Then he found a way to resist. With all the concentration he could muster, he steered his image of Khalid away from the wall and toward trees of the oasis. It was like guiding a dream while he was having it. To sustain his concentration, he made the image of Khalid start doing the first crazy things that came to mind. Khalid began to skip, then jumped into the air, grabbed the branch of a tree, and flipped himself impossibly high in the air like a gymnast.
The alien mind flared with anger inside his own, realizing Reg wasn’t cooperating. The painful seizure intensified, and the wordless question rang through him: Where is the third one? But Reg was learning quickly. In his imagination, Khalid was suddenly dressed in top hat and tails, dancing through the oasis like Fred Astaire in the old movie Reg had seen a week earlier. The pain began to subside as Reg began to understand how he could control the confrontation with the invisible presence. The idea occurred to him that he might even be able to turn the tables and attack his attacker. At that point, the alien presence quickly withdrew.
A second later, the real Khalid leaned in a window and blasted away at the bioarmor until it collapsed, and the alien was torn to shreds.
*
In another part of the oasis, Tye had injured himself twice before his team had spotted any of the invaders. First he cut his hand tripping over a garbage can, then twisted an ankle trying to run backwards. For his own safety, Miriyam assigned him to stay where he was and “guard” the center of the oasis. Then she and Ali disappeared into a thicket of tall ferns and densely clustered palms.
The twigs and dried leaves on the ground crunched under their boots as they prowled forward, glancing at one another through the vegetation. The pair of them were about as different as two people could possibly be, but they shared soldiering skills in common and were able to move ahead efficiently and quietly, coordinating their movements with subtle gestures and facial expressions. Miriyam froze in mid-stride when she heard Ali tap his finger against the side of his assault rifle. He had seen something. She followed his gaze until she saw it, too. Far ahead, one of the tentacled gray giants was coming toward them. It was following a trickling stream of runoff water into the oasis.
Speaking only with his hands, Ali suggested they put themselves in the predator’s path and lie in wait. Miriyam agreed and followed him toward a little clearing where the water ran close to a set of picnic tables. After selecting their hiding places, they settled in to wait. Between occasional bursts of gunfire coming from the battle near the post office, they could hear it rustling closer. Ali couldn’t see it from where he was, so he relied on Miriyam to monitor the thing’s progress. She was hiding behind a tree and peeked around it every so often, then nodded in his direction. Then she looked around the oasis as if she were just realizing where she was. She shook her head and smiled at the absu
rdity of the situation. Ali smiled back at her, agreeing wholeheartedly. Silently, she asked if he was scared. He looked back at her with an expression that said of course not. But a moment later, he changed his mind and nodded that yes, he was. Terrified, in fact. They both smiled again until Miriyam realized the rustling had stopped.
She peeked out and saw something repulsive. The creature had stopped and lowered itself into a squatting position over the water. The large skull-thorax opened slowly, like the halves of a clamshell, to reveal the smaller body tucked inside under a layer of clear gelatin. It was an indistinct mass of tissue except for the bulging eyes. They stood out like a pair of polished-silver goose eggs. Ali snapped his fingers to get Miriyam’s attention, but she waved him off without looking away from the gruesome sight. The alien lifted itself partially out of the body cavity and reached down to the water with its two-fingered hands. Although it made no attempt to scoop the water up or lower its mouthless face to the surface, it appeared to be drinking, absorbing the water through its skin.
Miriyam put her fingers to her lips, slid away from her tree, and began snaking silently closer. To get the shot she needed, she had to get down into the streambed away from intervening obstacles. She would be vulnerable, away from cover, but she wanted to pick the enemy off with one shot rather than risk a prolonged firefight. She crawled forward on her stomach until there was nothing between her and her target. Before she could kill it, the sound of an automatic weapon erupted in another part of the oasis. The alien darted back into its burrow and the bioarmor snapped closed. It started marching forward, fast. Miriyam had nowhere to run.
Ali reacted quickly when he saw she was trapped. “Here I am!” he cried. He stood up and showed himself in the clearing, waving his arms. He taunted the creature with choice Arab-style insults. “Come get me, you son of a jackal; come close so I can spit in your mouth.”
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