He continued fiddling with the strange device until Fadeela finally solved the riddle. She moved down to the end of the truck and told Reg to point the gun down at the shoulder of the road rushing away behind them. Then she touched the tip of her finger to one of the coppery flippers and, a second later, a pulse ripped out of the gun and exploded in the dirt.
“Now aim over there, at those rocks,” she said. And again the gun went off a second after she touched it. The pulse flew in the direction of the rock formation he’d pointed at, but didn’t connect. After some experimentation, the operating principles of the weapon became clear to them. Getting the weapon to fire required two or more people making contact with it and mentally commanding it to send out a pulse. Aiming it was just as easy. If both shooters agreed where they wanted the pulse to go, it went there.
It was an awesome weapon: lightweight, powerful, accurate, and didn’t seem to need reloading. By force of will alone, it could be made to deliver one pulse per second. The team began to have fun with it, imagining they were blasting away at tentacled exoskeletons. They passed it around, and everyone learned to use it. Everyone except Sutton. He was waiting to be asked, but the invitation never came. Eventually, he moved toward the cab of the truck and pretended to take a nap.
“It makes sense,” Reg said. “They think together, as one mind. But we’re all separate. This little gizmo seems to need the go-ahead from more that one mind before it will fire. They must have built that function in, designed it that way.”
“If we could build guns that worked the same way, it would solve a lot of our problems in the world,” Edward mused. “If it always took more than one person to squeeze a trigger, we’d have less violence, especially killings. There would be no more lone gunmen going on killing sprees.”
“Can you describe what it’s like?” Yossi asked Reg. “What is this telepathic interrogation they do?”
“You mean the mind-lock?” Reg asked.
“Yeah, what does it feel like?”
“And how did you know there was more than one mind?”
Reg wasn’t sure he could describe the sensation. He tried. At first he fumbled for the words, but then started talking more freely. He was still telling them about it when the truck pulled off the road and approached the gates of an isolated military facility.
Ali got out of the truck and talked to the soldiers in the guardhouse for several minutes before he convinced them to roll the gates open and allow the truck to pass.
They drove into what looked at first to be an ordinary Saudi military base: jeeps, trucks, Quonset hut military barracks, and a few hangars alongside a poorly maintained landing strip.
Almost at once, the international crew realized something was amiss. The base was large enough to require several hundred personnel. But even in the middle of the afternoon, there was not a single person outside. The tires on the jeeps and trucks were flat, as if they hadn’t been moved for a long time. The curtains and blinds were all drawn. None of the buildings seemed to have any air-conditioning units. Obviously, the entire base was some sort of decoy. They asked Ali about it, but he waved them off, telling them he didn’t know anything about the place.
Farther on, they came into a well-tended part of the facility and were surprised to see a series of greenhouses surrounding a large one-story building. A sign in front identified it as the Al-Sayyid Agricultural Research Facility. The helicopter that had passed them earlier was parked on a patch of lawn between the greenhouses and the main building. The pilot of the craft saluted them as they drove past.
“Don’t you think that’s a little odd?” Reg asked. “There’s not a farm within a hundred miles of here.” No one knew quite what to make of the place, but they all had other issues on their minds.
“Maybe they want to make their desert bloom,” Yossi suggested, and they left it at that.
Ali drove past the last set of buildings to the end of the paved road and headed out onto a dusty, rutted trail that took them into a field of weeds and tall bushes. When they’d driven half a mile, he stopped the truck and turned off the engine.
“This is it,” he announced to his bewildered passengers. He left the trail and walked toward a dense clump of thorny bushes, which he kicked aside to clear a path. At the center of the weed patch, they found themselves standing on a slab of concrete. Ali stomped on the ground with his boot until he heard a hollow sound. He then brushed away a layer of sand and dirt to reveal an iron door. Further searching led him to an electric switch box. He flipped it open and entered a sequence of numbers on the keypad hidden inside. There was a sharp click when the door unlocked automatically.
“I thought you didn’t know anything about this place,” Reg said.
Ali shrugged. “I lied.” He lifted the door and led the way down a set of stairs.
The bunker was roughly the size of a basement for a house that was never built above. Its concrete walls were lined with steel shelving stocked with cardboard and metal boxes. Everything was coated in a layer of fine dust. When they wiped away the dust and read the packing labels, Edward and Ali were disappointed with what they saw.
“What does it say?” Miriyam asked.
“Gas masks,” Edward told her. “Nothing but gas masks.”
There were also rubber suits, medical supplies, and oxygen canisters—things you’d need in the event of chemical warfare. Ali was unfazed. He said they should keep looking, that there were flamethrowers down there somewhere.
Eventually, he found what he was looking for. A pair of antique flamethrowers that looked like thick-barreled field guns from World War I. He carried them out into the light and laid them on the ground.
“We came all the way out here for these?” Tye asked. “I’ll be surprised if they still work.”
“They work,” Ali assured him, lifting several canisters of fuel out of the bunker. The Cyrillic lettering stenciled onto the tanks indicated that they had come from the former Soviet Union. Ali also found a pair of rotting leather harnesses that allowed the tanks to be strapped to the back of the soldiers using the weapons.
Edward volunteered to act as the guinea pig and test them. After connecting a tank to a flamethrower, he strapped the equipment on and lit the small pilot light at the tip of the gun. Then he pointed it out into the sand and squeezed the trigger. A roaring gush of flame spewed out and shot more than a hundred feet through the air. Alarmed, Edward quickly released the trigger, but the flame continued to flare out of the gun until the canister was empty. When it was finished, there was a trail of fire burning on the desert floor.
“It still works,” Edward observed.
A few minutes later, as they were loading their supplies into the truck, they heard the sound of gunfire in the distance. It came from the agricultural facility. The team quickly piled into the truck and raced toward the greenhouses to see what was going on. They were still a mile away when they saw the helicopter parked on the lawn explode under the impact of an alien pulse weapon.
“Whoa! Stop the truck!”
Ali had the accelerator jammed down on the floor. The engine screamed in second gear before he shifted into third and raced forward. He gave every indication that he was going to drive right up to the front doors, whether the aliens were there or not. The passengers yelled at him to slow down, that he was going to get them all killed. Through the dingy glass of the greenhouses that surrounded the research building, they could see the movement of large shapes, aliens in their biomechanical armor. The only person the driver would listen to was Miriyam. She directed him to steer a course between two of the greenhouses and then to stop along a blank wall on the main building. Everyone grabbed weapons and jumped out of the truck, taking cover behind it.
Miriyam whispered some orders to Yossi in Hebrew. He took off running, following the wall until he got to the corner of the building, and peered around it.
“What the hell are we doing?” Sutton asked nervously. “This place looks like a plant nursery. Let the
m take it.” Yossi looked back and flashed a signal to Miriyam.
“He sees them,” she told the others. “Stay close behind me. We’re going in.”
“Like hell we are.” The other soldiers glanced behind them at Sutton. “I’m staying right here. It’s stupid chasing them inside. Better to burn the place down and kill them as they come out.” His idea would have carried more weight if not for the sound of gunshots coming from the interior of the building. Someone was in there defending the place, and, from the sound of things, needed help fast.
Miriyam didn’t stay to argue. She pointed a finger at Tye. “You. You stay here with him.” Then she hurried forward, scanning the area with her assault rifle, to join Yossi.
Reg told Fadeela to stay behind and keep an eye on his mates, but she ignored him. Gripping her rifle clumsily, she chased after the others. By the time she and Reg reached the corner, both Israelis were advancing along the wall of one of the greenhouses. They stopped and waved the others forward. When the group assembled, they were near the ruined helicopter. Miriyam signaled for silence, then pointed through the smudged glass of the greenhouse at an armored alien standing on the other side, its tentacles waving idly in the air as it kept watch over the building’s entrance. Two of the many-legged chariots stood beside him.
“I’ll take care of this one,” Edward said, prowling forward with the flamethrower. Once he reached the corner of the greenhouse, he would be able to torch the alien in the back. Ali grabbed him by the arm and said not to use the flamethrower, that they couldn’t risk setting fire to the building.
“Why?” Edward asked. “What’s inside the building?”
The muscular Saudi captain declined to say, but obviously had his reasons. He led Edward back around the greenhouse to a safer angle. The alien sentry noticed them too late. Another roaring jet of fire spit from the barrel of the antique weapon, overwhelming the creature and one of the chariots. Within seconds, the exoskeleton toppled over and split open. The goo-slathered creature inside climbed out and tried to run. Remi killed it with a single shot.
“Let’s move.” Miriyam waved the others toward the building, and they darted for the open doors.
The team ran up the steps and hustled inside. Edward and Ali, coming from a different angle, were a few steps behind the others. As they reached the bottom step, gun blasts sounded from inside, and the team came scrambling back through the entrance with an alien warrior right behind them. As they scattered in all directions the skeletal figure lifted its powerful arm and took aim with its bony finger.
Edward, standing only ten feet away, closed his eyes and squeezed down on the handgrip of his flamethrower. When the canister was empty, the huge gray skeleton came crashing out of the fire and tumbled down the stairs. When the sides of the great shell head retracted and the delicately built creature within fell squirming and screeching to the ground, Yossi put a bullet into its head.
“We must go inside,” Ali yelled. “There are… we cannot let what is inside burn. It is very dangerous.” Edward’s flamethrower had set the building on fire.
‘Tell us what is inside,” Miriyam demanded.
The captain hesitated, but finally blurted out the truth. “Biological weapons, chemical weapons. I don’t know. But they are very dangerous, very dangerous. We must not let them escape into the air.”
“Biological weapons?” Miriyam yelled. “Why do you have such filthy things? It is illegal!”
“There is no time to argue,” Ali told her. “We must not let these weapons be captured.”
Afraid of what might happen if he waited a moment longer, Ali rushed up the stairs and plunged through the fire-engulfed entrance room. The others followed him in. Stumbling and groping their way through the flames, they broke though into an adjoining hallway. With Ali and Miriyam in the lead, they began moving through the building, throwing open the first few doors they found. Behind the doors were private offices crowded with bookshelves and tables full of blueprints.
“Let’s go! We’ve got to hurry,” Miriyam yelled. She turned a corner in the hallway without checking first and took a pulse blast in the face. She flew backwards, slamming against the opposite wall. A second later, two aliens came screeching around the corner. The one in front was squeezing off pulse blasts to clear the way while the one behind him carried a silver box in his arms.
Reg opened one of the office doors and pulled Fadeela inside. Those who couldn’t get out of the hallway rolled into the corners. They fired their weapons as the huge creatures trotted past them, but the aliens, seeing the fire ahead, ignored them. Afraid of the fire, the lead alien lowered its shoulder and crashed through one of the office doors. The other one followed him inside, and, a second later, there was a crash of breaking glass. They had escaped through one of the windows.
“They’re getting away,” Edward yelled, chasing into the office after them. When he reached the window frame, he took aim at the fleeing figures and prepared to blast them with liquid fire. Ali rushed in, grabbed the barrel of the flamethrower, and pointed it at the ceiling.
“Don’t do it,” he said in Arabic. “You’ll kill all of us.” In one motion, the creatures threw themselves into their chariot and began to race away. There was no possibility of catching them. “Come,” Ali said, “we have to hurry.” He pulled Edward back into the hallway, and they moved to where Fadeela and Remi were examining Miriyam. The pulse blast had turned her head into a blackened gourd with a few ringlet curls still hanging off the back.
“She’s dead,” Ali said sadly, “but we have to keep moving.” He led the way down the twisting hallway, staying a few steps ahead of the others. They came to a set of glass security doors that required an electronic key. They’d been rammed open just wide enough to allow an eight-foot-tall body with a flaring head shell to slip between them. Ali raced through and into the next room, which was a laboratory full of sophisticated equipment arranged into several workstations. The bright white walls were splattered with blood. Four mangled bodies, men in lab coats, lay sprawled on the floor. Ali stepped over them and went to a steel door that looked like a walk-in safe. He got into position, then gave Yossi the nod to tear the door open. When he did, smoky wisps of chilled air floated out. The door led to another room, a refrigerated laboratory. Overturned tables and broken glass were strewn on the floor. Ali inched through the doorway. Yossi, close on his heels, scanned the frosty interior with the barrel of his assault rifle and halted when he saw something move. Ali stopped short when he felt Yossi’s hand on his back. Without a word, Yossi reached past him and pointed toward the danger. Hiding in the corner, behind a set of rolling shelves, something twitched about three feet above the floor. To Ali it looked like the end of a tentacle. But as he moved closer and leveled his weapon, he saw that it was a human hand.
A man in a white lab coat was cowering in the corner, arms wrapped around his head. He was shaking with fear and with cold. He screamed when he heard the footsteps, and tried to burrow deeper into the corner. When they lifted him to his feet, there were trickles of blood coming from both nostrils, and the whites of his eyes had gone bright red. Ali picked him up and dragged him out of the cold room into the main laboratory.
“Where are the chemicals? We have to get them out of here.”
The man looked at Ali blankly, then turned and stared around him at the bloodstained walls and the bodies on the floor. He didn’t seem to recognize where he was, but his eyes focused when he noticed Edward’s uniform. He snapped out of his daze and smiled weakly at the man with the flamethrower.
“You’re Jordanian? Me too,” he said in Arabic, then immediately burst into tears.
“Where are the weapons?” Ali insisted. “Where are the chemicals?”
The man ignored the question, sinking to his knees and apologizing desperately to Edward in Arabic. Ali reached down and shook him. “The building is on fire,” he shouted. “Where are the chemicals?”
The man continued to whimper as if he were begging
for forgiveness. Reg got to his knees so he could talk to the man face-to-face. “It was inside you, wasn’t it? Inside your head, hurting you and demanding to know things. And you told it everything it wanted to know so the pain would go away.” The man’s eyes opened wide in a new kind of terror, but Reg quickly moved to put him at ease. “They did the same thing to me. They’re doing it to a lot of people. There’s no reason to be ashamed. But right now the building is on fire, and you have chemical weapons in here. Where are they?”
“Not chemical,” the man said softly. “Biological. We culture biological weapons, and they’re gone. They took everything. We were evacuating and had packed everything we didn’t destroy. There is a helicopter waiting outside.”
“So there’s nothing left?”
“Nothing,” the man said. “The alien monsters took everything that was still here.
When Reg was convinced the building was clear of bioweapons, he picked the man up. “Is there another way out of here?”
The scientist was unsteady on his feet but walked under his own power to a side exit and led them outside. He sat down against one of the greenhouses while Ali went back inside to retrieve Miriyam’s body. He carried her out on his shoulder and looked around for the best place to leave her. He decided on the greenhouse and carried her inside. Yossi found a shovel and dug a grave while the others talked to the scientist.
Reg didn’t know much about biological weapons; none of them did. He knew they were meant to take advantage of human susceptibility to disease, that they were universally despised and widely manufactured. He knew that they were unstable weapons, difficult to control once they had been deployed.
“What were you making in there?”
“Too much.” The scientist sobbed. “I told the Saudis we were producing too much, that it was dangerous.” He looked up at the pilots, hoping for sympathy, but found only stern, impatient expressions. As he realized that they would force him to reveal the lab’s secrets, his tone swung from apologetic to defensive. “I want to say, first of all, that most of our work here does not involve biological warfare.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 72