“Let me make this as clear as I can,” he said, watching nine pairs of eyes following him. The one who’d been badly drunk was sobering up quickly. “You are in a world of shit!”
He drew his pistol and shot one of them through the head. The Order Policemen looked as if they were going to faint. They would have been screaming if Nicolas hadn’t taken the precaution of wrapping duct tape around their mouths. He switched his pistol to a second target and held it right between his eyes, watching as the man shook in fear. He felt no sympathy. The man had been part of a gang of looters, rapists and – most importantly of all – traitors. They weren't worthy of even the kind of respect Nicolas would have offered to a terrorist from the Middle East. At least the terrorists had had grand dreams, even if they were tinged with madness. And the United States had been in no danger of losing.
“Under the authority of the President of the United States, I am authorised to terminate your sorry fucking butts whenever I feel like it,” he thundered. “I am authorised to cut off your fingers one by one until you can’t jerk off to the memories of girls who would never have let you touch them unless you had more money than Bill Gates! I advise you strongly not to piss me off!”
He looked from face to face, looking for the weakest. “You will tell me exactly what I need to know, understand?” He snapped. “I will hurt you until you tell me everything I want to know.”
His hand alighted on one of the Order Policemen and he yanked the duct tape away from his mouth. “You,” he snapped, so close that he could practically kiss the man’s face. “What did you do to those poor people?”
“We had no choice,” the Order Policeman protested. Nicolas was mildly surprised that the man had been able to come up with anything reassembling a coherent response. “We were only following orders…”
“Not good enough,” Nicolas said. He stepped back, and then placed a nasty kick right against the man’s arm. It broke in several places and he howled in pain. “What did you do to them?”
The story came out in fits and starts, but most of it tallied with what Nicolas had heard from the underground network. They’d been ordered to the village and ordered to carry out an atrocity. The man he was interrogating had even been stupid enough to confess that he’d enjoyed the raping and would do it again, if he had half a chance. Nicolas had no intention of giving him any hope at all. Finally, he bound up the man’s mouth again and moved on to the next Order Policeman. The next one spoke rapidly, unable to meet his eyes. The stories matched in almost every particular.
“Your leader, the Walking Dead man,” he said, finally. “Where is he now?”
“We don’t know,” the man said. Nicolas casually broke two of his fingers. He screamed in pain. “We don’t know, I promise!”
“I think I believe him,” Brian said. Nicolas bit down several responses that came to mind. “He’s telling the truth.”
Nicolas nodded, sickened despite himself. Battlefield integration was a rare art, one practised only on covert missions or when a terrorist was badly wounded and wanted to confess before discovering that Allah didn’t provide seventy-two virgins to scrum bags who’d killed hundreds of people who followed the same religion. Normally, they would have used truth drugs, yet there was no time. They didn’t know how long it would be before the aliens realised that something was badly wrong and dispatched a QRT from their nearest base.
“Doubtless,” he sneered finally. He bandaged up the man’s mouth again. “Now, you all just sit there and wait, ok?”
He stalked out of the room and produced a small cylinder from his belt, using it to spray liquid through the building. When he’d been a kid, he’d had fantasies of blowing up his school. Now, he got to actually live the dream. He’d thought about simply cutting their throats or finishing them off with bullets, but he needed to send a message. Atrocities would not be allowed to go unpunished.
“Everyone out,” he said, producing a detonator from his pocket and setting it for five minutes. “It’s time to go boom.”
He put the detonator inside the school, glanced around for signs of an incoming alien force, and then led the way back to the base, running for their lives. Who knew how quickly the aliens would respond?
***
Jason groaned as he struggled against his bonds, but it was hopeless. He thought that if he kept licking at the duct tape, he'd be able to get rid of the gag if nothing else, but the taste was disgusting and he had a nasty suspicion that it was probably poisoned. The men who’d beaten them and left them tied up had also left them alive. Why? The thought kept going round and round in his head. Why had they been left alive?
They'd known what they’d done, they’d known what he’d done, yet they’d left him alive? It made no sense at all. He wanted to be sick again, but he swallowed desperately, trying to avoid being sick inside the gag. Perhaps it would burst the gag off his mouth, yet it was far more likely that it would choke him and he’d die, suffocated by his own vomit. The mere thought caused the gorge to rise up and he swallowed again and again, until he smelled smoke. Something was burning…
Sheer panic struck him as a wave of bright fire washed into the room, as if it was following a line someone had drawn on the floor. Sheer naked panic rose up inside him as the flames spread rapidly to the beer crates and papers he’d left lying about, and then the floor and ceiling itself. A wave of heat washed against him as the fire started to burn away at his clothes, sending searing pain washing down his body. He jerked away desperately, but it was too late. The flames were already burning his body…he looked up and saw the fire licking around the roof, threatening to bring a ton of burning rubble down on their heads. Books, desks and chairs were catching fire and it was becoming increasingly hard to breathe. The floor creaked alarmingly underneath them…
He tried desperately to scream, but it was too late. He saw, just for a moment, the faces of those he’d hurt, raped or killed laughing at him, and then there was nothing, but the fire.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Tel Aviv, Israel
Day 175
“Surrender or die, in other words.”
President Ehud Barak of Israel looked around the table. The War Cabinet looked back at him. Even deep under the city, in a bunker that was supposed to be proof against all of the threats that threatened Israel’s very existence, no one felt safe. The ultimatum had arrived only an hour ago and time was running out.
“You’ve read the note,” he continued. “They want us to surrender our nuclear weapons, our air force and most of our ground-based weapons systems. They want us to open up our facilities, computer files and operational bases to inspection, now and at any time in the future they deem fit. In short, they wish to strip us naked – and if we refuse to strip for them, they will launch an immediate invasion of our territory. We have one hour left to reply.”
He paused. “There seems to be no way of delaying action or obtaining help,” he concluded. “What do we do?”
He saw the same thoughts played out across the faces of his friends, political enemies, and colleagues. Israel had been threatened before, her name blackened by a skilfully orchestrated media campaign that portrayed them as total monsters crushing Arabs for the sheer hell of it, while none of the provocations were ever reported outside Israel itself. From the moment Israel was born, the country had been threatened and attacked time and time again, saved only by the grace of God and the incompetence of her enemies. The endless Palestinian question hung over the region like a cloud, used by Arab leaders to justify keeping their own populations under control – not that any of them cared about the Palestinians, of course. They were just there to make useful tools and if a few thousand of them died at a time, who cared? Only the bleeding hearts in the West, who were happy to blame everything on Israel...
And then aliens had arrived and America had fallen. They’d acted at once, locking down the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, before making a global announcement that if there was the slightest sign of a threat
ening move, they’d launch a mass nuclear strike all around the Islamic Crescent. He hadn’t been bluffing either. The launch codes had been prepared, missile bunkers and strike aircraft had been placed on alert, and the entire country had girded itself for war. The threats had worked where blandishments and politely worded notes from the West had failed. The troubles in the West Bank had been kept under control and no Arab army had moved to threaten Israel. The Arabs had had problems of their own with street protests and civil war.
And then the aliens had landed in the Middle East and crushed the Arabs overnight. Ehud had served in a tank regiment and he had a low opinion of much of the Arab military forces, but having the aliens beat them so quickly had been alarming. A handful of Arab fighter jets had even flown to Israel and begged for sanctuary, a sanctuary the IAF had been willing to grant, just to learn what they could of the alien tactics. After what had happened to America, no one would ever take the aliens lightly again. And now…
He looked up at the map of the surrounding area, with all of the disputed territory carefully marked out. It showed hundreds of alien installations and cities, all of which seemed to have sprung up overnight. The aliens had landed and just started to expand out from their landing sites. They were having problems with insurgency movements of their own in the various Middle Eastern states, but none of them posed a significant threat, even with covert Israeli support. He’d never thought he’d see the day when Arabs and Jews worked against a common foe – it was just like something out of a bad American science-fiction movie! But the Americans were beaten and Israel was on her own. Her other allies couldn’t or wouldn’t help.
“I believe that the question is simple,” Amir Shkedy said. The Foreign Affairs Minister looked over at the Israeli Air Force Commander, Elyezer Benny. “Can we beat them?”
Benny hesitated. “Perhaps we can make them bleed,” he said. “We took care to analyze all of the recordings from the battles over America and came up with some new weapons and tactics that might – I say might – make a difference. We can increase the odds of scoring a kill by packing additional explosives into a missile, or even resorting to nuclear-tipped SAM missiles, but overall…they have too many advantages that we cannot overcome easily. We will find it hard to keep control of the airspace over our country.”
“Yet if we surrender and give them what they want,” Golda Livni pointed out, “there’s nothing to stop them from taking the rest of the country any time they liked.”
“Yes, Defence Minister,” Benny agreed. “We’ve have the choice between stripping naked, as the President said, or being stripped naked.”
He looked over the table at her. “The IAF stands ready to fight – we all knew that it might come down to a final battle to hold the line as long as possible – but it is my duty to inform you that the odds of success are not high. Our only hope for standing them off remains Operation Masada and…that will seriously piss them off. We could discover that we’ve bitten off far more than we could chew.”
“It’s not as if we could launch a strike on their airfields,” Golda said, crossly. Israel had opened the Six Days War by striking Egyptian airfields, but the aliens based their craft well out of reach, even to the best of Israeli technology. “You’re talking about striking directly at their civilian population.”
“Yes, Defence Ministry,” Benny said. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
Ehud shivered. Operation Masada had been conceived during the Clinton Years, when it had seemed all-too-likely that Israel would be abandoned and left to face the Arabs on her own. It called for nothing less than the deployment of two-thirds of the Israeli nuclear weapons against every Arab city, military base and army group within range. As Israel’s technology improved, the circle of guaranteed destruction had widened until it reached all the way to Iran, Yemen and even Libya. Millions of Arabs would have died if the plan had even been implemented. Every Israeli President or Prime Minister had gone into office knowing that they might be the one to unleash mass slaughter – a second Holocaust – on a vast scale. The thought kept him from sleeping at times. No one, not even Hitler himself, could have conceived of such a nightmare, or comprehended the scale of destruction. The Arabs had almost nothing in the way of civil defence planning and training. They’d die in their millions.
And now…now the plan had been altered. They would fire, not on Arab cities, but on alien bases and cities, housing – he assumed – their civilian population. How many aliens would die in such strikes? How many could they afford to lose…or would they merely bombard Israel into dust and ash in response? He had always known that he might face a chemical or biological strike that would demand a nuclear response – how could he expect the aliens to think differently? They’d want blood, Israeli blood.
He looked over at the head of the Mossad, the most feared and hated secret service in the world. It would have appalled the Arabs to know that the director of the organisation was a young woman - Rivka Brennen – who looked much younger than her fifty years. Her smile hid a mind like a steel trap, filled with total devotion to Israel and a willingness to do whatever was necessary to hurt her enemies.
“We have the covert links to the Arab resistance groups,” he said. “Can’t we use them to push the aliens hard enough to force a delay?”
“I doubt it,” Rivka said. “The alien bases are well-secured by now and while they might mount a few strikes, they won't be able to inflict much damage. The alien technology is simply too powerful. I don’t think they really care about uprisings and insurgencies within the cities themselves. Only their collaborators get hurt.”
Ehud nodded. He knew which group would quite happily serve as collaborators, even without their radical leadership, which had departed en masse for Mecca and the struggle to liberate the Islamic Holy City from the aliens. The Mossad had been quite willing to facilitate transport – another alliance made in Hell – under the theory that either the radicals, the ones committed to the destruction of Israel, or the aliens would die. Either way, Israel came out ahead.
“This is an issue that touches upon the survival of our country itself,” David bar Elias said. The Prime Minister was older than most of the men in the room, yet he was still in full command of his faculties. “This is the moment of truth for all of us.
“I was born just before they came for my family and put them in the camps,” he continued. “I grew up under the iron control of the Nazis. I wouldn’t have survived if some of the others in the camp hadn’t given up their rations to keep me alive. A woman whose newborn child had died was convinced to allow me to suckle at her breast to gain what milk I could; a man who was on the verge of death gave me all of his food, accepting his own fate so that I might live. My memories of the camp remain a blur of images, of pain, of starvation, of the certain knowledge that our lives could be ended at any moment on a whim. The finest memory in my life was the moment when the camp was liberated by the Americans, who arrived one day like gods come to free us from hell.
“By then, it was too late for many others. My older sister had become the plaything of one of the guards – which she used to gain favours for the family, whoring herself so that we might live – and her lover had cut her throat, a day before they abandoned the camp and tried to flee. My mother had been beaten to death for not working hard enough for one of the SS goons. My uncles and aunties and most of their families had been transferred, we thought, to another working camp with better conditions. We know now that they went into the gas chambers. My survival – mine and my father’s survival – was nothing less than a miracle. My father took me and we emigrated to our country, along with a handful of other survivors who had banded into a family unit. I was nine years old at the time.
“And since then, Israel, my country, has been attacked time and time again, by foes as merciless and as implacable as the Nazis themselves. We were not the ones who broke the UN’s truce during the first war. Where was the UN when rockets and missiles were making life int
olerable in our settlements? Where was human decency when they were using suicide bombers to kill our young men and women? We learned that we could never rely on anyone to defend us from our enemies. We made concessions; they lapped them up and demanded more. We refused to submit to blackmail; they painted us as the enemy, foes of peace, people who refused to accept the peace of the grave! The aliens are just another threat in a long line of threats!
“If we accept theses terms, we render ourselves defenceless, once and for all,” he concluded. “We cannot – we must not – accept them! Why do they even want Israel anyway? We’re tiny, compared to the territory they have already overwhelmed and occupied, yet we’re tougher. We didn’t stand up for ourselves when the Nazis came to kill every Jew in the world, having given us more than enough warning, and six million of us died! Not again. Never again!”
Ehud rubbed the side of his head. “You do know that the aliens don’t seem to have extermination in mind,” he said. “They might be willing to compromise.”
“The only bargains worth making are the ones we can enforce,” David bar Elias snapped. “If we agree to those…insulting terms, we will be surrendering every hope of preventing them from simply taking the rest any time they feel like it. Why would they consider us a threat to them? Who cares how many Arabs they kill?”
“The general theory among the analysts is that they’re concerned about the prospect of a mass nuclear strike – Operation Masada, shall we say?” Rivka said. “They may have realised that we have a plan to strike at their cities and decided that the risk is unacceptable, or they might have discovered that we have been supporting insurgency movements against them. The few sources we have within the collaborator governments don’t know anything worth mentioning.”
Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot Page 36