Reg was incredulous. “What are you doing here?”
The colonel rolled his eyes. “I could write a book. Come on, follow me.” He led the way to the opposite side of the road, where they would be out of the line of fire. Parked along the shoulder was the Yemeni caravan’s transportation: horses, camels, bicycles, motorcycles, and a few passenger cars.
Thomson explained that after the city destroyer was shot down, some rough-looking customers showed up in the desert asking about Reg. He’d hidden himself in the dunes until they flew away, then accepted a ride in a helicopter to Khamis Moushayt. From there, he’d gone to the town of Abha in Yemen, where he’d enlisted in this civilian army that was coming to join the war in the desert.
“We’ve been traveling since yesterday noon, and just when we got to our turnoff road, I recognized that Ethiopian chap from the camp. He told me you’d gone this way.”
As Thomson spoke, Reg looked down the other side of the mountain. As he’d seen many times from the air, one side was a collection of desolate stone canyons leading down to the inhospitable desert, while the other was moist, green, and overgrown with trees. The verdant western slope was steep. It plunged dramatically down to a narrow coastal plane. Beyond that was the Red Sea. The smokestacks of the oil refinery at Dawqah glinted back at him in the sun, as if trying to catch his attention. Reg remembered what Mr. Yamani had said about Dawqah being a “nasty little town.” But from where he stood, it sparkled like the promised land. He interrupted what the colonel was saying.
“Thomson, I need a car. I have to get to the coast.” He lifted the amber-colored organism out of his shirt and showed it to him. “They’re chasing me because of this.”
“Oh, Lord,” Thomson said, recoiling from the pulsating mass. “What is it?”
“No time to explain. But they can sense where it is. I want to lead them down the coast. If I stay here, all these people will be slaughtered.”
“Come with me.”
They jogged down the road until Thomson found someone he recognized, a young man in tight slacks and a silk dress shirt. He looked like he was dressed for an evening of disco dancing except for the djambiya tucked into his wide leather belt. Whipping out his trusty phrase book, Thomson said a few words to him in pidgin Arabic.
“Mish mumkin,” the man said. Impossible. His car keys made a visible lump in the tight fabric of his pants pocket.
“Show him,” Thomson said. Reg obliged. When the man saw the brainlike blob he took out his keys without another word and tossed them to Reg. Thomson led him to a battered Ford sedan. Reg jumped in and started the engine.
“You coming?” he asked Thomson.
“I’ll take my chances here.”
“Get these people out of the way if you can. They’re not going to make much difference.”
“Good luck.”
“See you around.” Reg had shifted into drive and put his foot on the gas, when Thomson remembered something and called to him.
“I almost forgot. Here’s that tape recording you wanted.” From his breast pocket, he pulled out a cassette tape and handed it through the window. “I wouldn’t play it in front of Faisal if I were you. He comes off smelling pretty rotten.”
“You’re a good man, Colonel.”
“Tally-ho and all that rot,” he shot back, as Reg hit the gas and sped away.
When he came to the road leading down to the coast, he saw Remi among the men firing at the advancing aliens. He honked the horn until the big Ethiopian turned around and ran to the car. He jumped in and they took off down the hill, driving slowly and honking their horn. Reg thought the rest of the team might be moving through the trees and wanted to draw their attention. It worked. About two miles from the turnoff, they encountered a beanpole of a man with bright red hair standing in the middle of the road with his legs spread wide and a rifle pointed at them. It was Tye.
When Reg rolled to a stop, the others came running out of the trees and crammed themselves and their weapons into the two-door sedan. Edward was the last one standing outside.
“Too many big people and too many guns,” he said. Reg, Ali, and Tye were already crowded into the front seat, with Ali’s field gun stretching from one door to the other. Edward handed the silver case delicately to a pair of hands in the backseat before climbing inside to join Fadeela, Remi, and Yossi. Before the doors were closed, Reg put his foot through the floor and sent them hurtling down the road.
“Where are we going?” Ali asked, then quickly changed his mind. “Don’t tell me. I probably don’t want to know.” After a couple of miles, the team convinced Reg to slow down. They had a large start on the aliens, and as long as they kept the pace above fifty miles per hour, the chariots couldn’t gain on them.
As the others watched out the rear window for signs of danger, Fadeela was developing another plan. “When we reach the coastal road, there is an airport a few miles north of Dawqah. We can take a plane from there to Jeddah, where someone will know how to dispose of these horrible weapons.”
Reg kept his eyes on the road and said that was a good idea. When they came out of the trees and saw the coast road in front of them, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. They were almost home free. They turned north onto the highway and increased their speed. There was traffic on the highway, but not much. Many of the cars they passed were loaded down with families and as many personal possessions as they could carry. The faces behind the windows looked tired and frightened. Hardly anyone gave Reg or the overcrowded Ford a second glance. For a few moments, it felt almost like an ordinary day. The other drivers were observing the speed limit and the rules of the road. Some of them flashed dirty looks at Reg as he sped past them, not suspecting the car with the Yemeni license plates contained enough weapons-grade poison to kill everyone in the Middle East. Even though it was still a few miles ahead of them, Reg could smell the gaseous stench of the refinery.
“I don’t believe it,” Yossi said from the backseat.
“What’s that?” Tye asked.
“They’re coming through the trees. All of them.” They all turned to see what he was talking about and could hardly believe their eyes. It looked like an avalanche moving diagonally down the mountainside, shaking the trees as it came. The alien army had left the winding road to take a more efficient angle of pursuit. They crashed down the slope at a phenomenal rate of speed, weaving around some trees, knocking the others to the ground.
A blaring horn brought Reg’s attention back to his driving. He swerved back into his lane a second before colliding head-on with a semi. Ali had already figured out what Reg had in mind and pointed him toward the exit he wanted. Then he turned around and told the others what he thought the crazed Englishman behind the wheel had in mind. When he was finished Reg looked at him, impressed.
“I thought the only mind readers around here were the ones from outer space.”
They sped toward the front gates of the refinery and the guards who stepped out of their kiosk to question them. The car crashed through a fence and charged into the facility. They followed the road between a pair of gigantic storage tanks, then past the separating station with its open construction and vertical spires rising like stainless-steel minarets. Soon they came to a round, heavily fortified building that looked like it must be the refinery’s control room. When the Ford skidded to a halt, a half dozen men who had been standing around drinking coffee and talking scattered in all directions, thinking they were under attack by terrorists.
Ali caught one of them and dragged him back to the car, explaining, as politely as he could under the circumstances, that they needed access to the refinery’s computer system. When the man asked why, Ali told him.
“We need to spill all the oil on the ground and set the place on fire.”
“Are you crazy?”
“That has nothing to do with it! Show us the computers!”
The man scoffed and refused to cooperate. The team did what they could to convince him. Fadeela told him t
hat several hundred, perhaps thousands, of aliens would be arriving at the refinery within the next few minutes, and Reg showed him the amber-colored organism. Still the man refused. But he changed his mind when Yossi shot him in the forearm, then pushed the man’s nose flat with the hot end of his pistol.
“I’ll count to three,” said the Israeli. “One, two—”
“Don’t shoot!” shouted the injured man. “I will take you inside!”
He led them up a set of steel stairs and entered a numerical code into the keypad next to the door. It opened, and Ali shoved the man through the doorway. Tye, Fadeela, and Remi followed him.
“What about the case?” Edward asked. “We have to get these biological weapons out of the area.”
“We’ll burn them,” Reg said, “along with everything else.”
“That’s too dangerous. There’s still time to get them out of here.”
Reg tossed the keys to Yossi. “Go with him.” And after wishing both men luck, he entered the control room.
At first, the technicians inside resisted. They said it was impossible to spill the oil intentionally, that the computers weren’t designed to do such things. The only way to accomplish what the team was asking would be to physically destroy the pipelines one by one. The whole time they talked, Tye leaned over the main routing screen, studying it. When Reg came to look over his shoulder, he saw a complicated diagram showing a tangle of lines and a confusing galaxy of blinking lights. The display was no more comprehensible to him than the designs he’d seen on the tops of the black tables inside the tower.
“It looks simple enough,” Tye said. “This board controls the movement of oil through the entire refinery. It allows them to pump it out of one tank and into another. See how the pipelines are all numbered to correspond with the switches here at the bottom. Then you’ve got your pressure gauges and automatic shutoffs at intervals along each pipe.” He pointed to various spots on the schematic, assuming Reg was following along.
“So how do we spill the oil?”
“Easy. We close down all the lines and start all the pumps at the same time. Then we sit back and wait for the pipes to burst under the pressure.” He started throwing switches with both hands, activating some and deactivating others, while Reg looked on skeptically. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? For a minute, it seemed to work. Red lights started flashing and warning buzzers sounded. But then everything returned to normal. Tye scratched his chin, thinking. “The system senses the pressure buildup and shuts down the pumps.”
“How do we circumvent the shutoff system?” he asked the technicians.
“Mish mumkin,” one of them said. “We cannot override the fail-safe. It’s all automatic.”
“Yossi and Edward are coming back. And they’ve got company,” Fadeela announced, looking out a window. Reg knew what she was talking about and dragged one of the technicians across the room to show him. The man looked outside and couldn’t believe his eyes. Less than a hundred yards from him, a pair of ugly gray creatures with heads that looked rather like overgrown oyster shells were riding a walking sled and firing blasts of white light out of their fingertips. He stared at this startling scene for a moment or two, then ran to the switchboard and began pulling wires from the underside of the console. He shouted to his colleagues, who joined him at the control boards. Within seconds, the red lights and warning buzzers came back to life. The muffled sound of explosions came through the walls. All around the refinery, pipes began splitting open. Oil sprayed high into the air in some places and flowed out in dark rivers in others.
“We have done what you asked,” said the man who had torn out the wires. “Now let us leave. We have helicopters. You can go with us.”
“Wait. We’re not finished. How can we light the oil? We have to set it on fire.”
The man tossed Reg a book of matches and turned for the door. Almost as soon as it sealed behind him, something slammed against the outside wall on the opposite side of the room. Four armored aliens, sensing the presence of the amber organism, were trying to break in to retrieve it.
“Everybody outside!” Leaving the brain inside, the team raced out the door and made sure it was sealed behind them. They ran to take cover behind the next building and saw the Ford parked there. Ali found his field gun in the backseat and strapped it over his shoulder. A moment later, Edward came around the corner carrying the silver case. Yossi was right behind him.
“What happened?”
“We couldn’t find our way back to the front gates until it was too late. They’re all crossing the highway,” Yossi said. “More than a thousand of them.”
“We should have destroyed the weapons before,” Edward said. “I’m going to do it now.”
“How?”
“Give me those matches and I’ll climb up there.” He pointed to the ladder rising up the side of one of the ten-story-tall storage tanks. “When I’m inside, I’ll set the whole thing on fire.”
“My God,” Tye said, impressed with the man’s conviction.
“I’ll go with you,” Yossi said, “I’ve got a lighter. And besides, you can’t trust a Palestinian with a big job.” It was Yossi’s idea of a joke. For the first time since they’d known him, he smiled.
Edward shook his head and appealed to the others. “Now do you see why we can’t stand the Jews?” But he returned Yossi’s grin, and said, “Come on, madman, let’s go.” The two men ran toward the nearest storage tank and began climbing the vertical steel ladder as fast as they could, bickering as they went.
Remi tipped over a trash can and found a discarded newspaper to use as kindling. “Let’s get started,” he said, and led the way toward the nearest lake of freshly spilled oil. They lit the newspaper and dropped it onto the oil, expecting it to erupt immediately into flames. Instead, the oil soaked into the paper until the fire went out. They tried again, this time using more paper to make a hotter fire.
“It’s supposed to burn,” Reg said.
A car came speeding around a corner not far away and turned toward the main gate. Before it got very far, a pulse blast ripped into its side. The vehicle flipped over and burst into flame. When they saw this, the team turned toward Tye.
“One step ahead of you,” he said, pulling out the alien weapon and unfolding the cloth he used to carry it. He let the flipperlike protrusions wind themselves around his forearm, then invited Reg to help him. “What do we hit?”
“Anything that will blow up.”
But the pulse weapon proved no more useful than the burning newspapers. They used it to blow open the side of an oil tank, to tear a gaping hole in the side of a building, and to dig craters in the ground where the oil was pooling. But they couldn’t start a fire.
They did, however, attract the attention of a squad of aliens, who came away from the control room to investigate. Ali knocked them backwards with a few blasts from his field gun while Reg and Tye picked them off one by one with the pulse gun. But more of them started coming around the corner. They came by the dozens, fearless behind their armor, and advanced on the four troublesome earthlings.
“We have to fall back,” Ali said.
But Reg disagreed. He pointed to Edward and Yossi, who were only halfway to the top of the ladder. They were shielded from view of the aliens by the curve of the tank. “We’ve got to hold them here until those two are inside. Then we’ll fall back.”
“By then it will be too late,” Fadeela said. “They’re surrounding us.”
There was no choice but to stay and defend their position. The best they could hope for was a fiery death, that once the two men were inside the tank, they would be successful in blowing it up and that the fire would spread. If not, all they would have accomplished was leading the aliens out of the desert and into the more densely populated coastal plain. And there was still a chance of the anthrax spores and ebola virus being spread.
When Edward reached the top, he handed the case to Yossi, lifted the cap door at the side of the roof, and
lowered himself inside. After taking the case back, he started down the ladder that ran along the inside of the tank. Then, as Yossi was climbing in after him, a series of loud explosions came from the far end of the refinery.
“Sounds like bombs,” Remi remarked.
“Yes, and helicopters,” Ali added.
“It must be the men from the control room,” Fadeela said. “They said they had helicopters.”
But a moment later, they saw a squadron of Apache helicopters rising over the oil field, firing missiles down at the alien army and starting a massive fire in the oil, a fire which quickly began rolling toward them. When pulse blasts began zipping toward the helicopters, they ducked behind the outlying buildings. Then another group of the fearsome gunships appeared on the opposite horizon and fired another volley of shells down onto the oil-soaked grounds.
“They’re starting fires around the perimeter,” Reg observed. “Smart boys.”
As soon as the aliens turned to fire on the second group of helicopters, the Apaches lowered out of view, and a third group lifted from the direction of the highway. When their shells slammed into the ground, a wall of fire cut off the team’s only means of escape. They were boxed in.
Reg looked around and nodded approvingly, thinking, Now that’s the way you run an aerial assault. He didn’t know if any of the men piloting the helicopters had been his students, but that didn’t stop him from feeling proud of the way they were conducting the operation. They were achieving their objectives without taking unnecessary risks and were displaying extraordinary teamwork.
“Where in the hell did these guys come from?” Tye wondered.
“They must be Faisal’s men,” Reg said.
The aliens panicked when they found themselves surrounded by fire. They ran in crazed circles, firing their weapons into the flames. Some of them opened their shells and jumped out. The ones who had been firing at the team forgot about them and rushed off to join the mayhem.
Yossi climbed back to the opening in the top of the tank. Reg noticed him because he was waving his arms and shouting, but he wasn’t shouting to Reg or the others. A helicopter came from the direction of the highway, broke through the wall of flame, and hovered over the tower long enough to allow Yossi and Edward to climb in. It wasn’t one of the Apaches, but a civilian helicopter.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 83