“Nifty?” Tye asked, incredulous. “It was like flying through a shoe box. Remind me never to get into a coach with either one of you two maniacs.”
Mohammed stayed in the lead position, steering toward the gap between two of the giant hatch doors. The firing cone, visible beyond them, was now fully extended. In a matter of moments, its destructive power would pulverize Mecca.
“More bad news,” Sutton reported. “We’ve got a bogey ahead and to the left.”
Reg peered down and saw that, indeed, an aircraft was streaking upward at a steep angle into their path. But it wasn’t an alien attacker. It was a Saudi F-15.
Reg keyed his radio. “Commander Faisal, I thought you’d be halfway to Riyadh by now. Decided to come back and join us?” “1 have come to save my people!” he shouted back. Unfortunately, Faisal wasn’t traveling alone. He had picked up one of the alien attackers, and it was closing behind him.
“You’ve got company,” Reg told him. “There’s an attacker below and behind. Don’t bring him up here, we’re in position.” “There is no time!” Faisal screamed back. An intense beam of white light was shooting from the tip of the firing cone, fixing itself on one of the tall minarets of the Great Mosque. “They are going to fire!” Faisal continued on his course, oblivious to both the alien behind him and the fact that his trajectory conflicted with Reg’s squadron’s. When the other pilots recognized the danger he was putting them into, they shouted at him to lead the attacker away. Faisal jigged and juked as the attacker began to fire its pulse weapon, but maintained his bearing.
“He wants the first shot,” Khalid said. “He’s going to cut us off.” “I’ll take care of this,” Reg said, diving out of line. He jammed the controls forward, milking every kilonewton of power from his twin turbofans. When he leveled off, he was right behind Faisal. “Turn off, Faisal!” Reg threatened.
“Shoot him down,” one of the pilots urged.
Reg was sorely tempted. He wasn’t actually out of missiles. He was still holding a Skyflash under his left wing, just in case. He sighted on Faisal’s F-15 and wrapped his hand tight around the grip trigger. But instead of downing the treacherous Saudi commander, he abruptly cut the fuel supply to his engines. Then he accelerated again as the alien fighter moved ahead of him. In a few seconds, he had positioned himself, locked on, and fired. The alien ship blew apart in a bright green flash.
Faisal jostled his way to the front of the line. To avoid a collision, Mohammed was forced to swing away only seconds before reaching the giant hatch doors. In order to shoot the gap and save himself, Mohammed swerved back toward the group, forcing everyone to decelerate. By the time they came into the clearing around the firing cone, Faisal’s missiles were already streaking away.
“Fire! Fire everything!” Reg yelled.
Scores of missiles shot toward the glittering weapon. Faisal’s AMRAAMs got there first and blew two large holes into the massive green structure. Debris rained into the sky. A moment later, when the other missiles struck, a chain reaction began to travel up the firing cone and into the body of the destroyer, just as the American communique had promised.
Reg looked up into the glowing recess of the ship. A massive open chamber surrounded the dangling gun tower. And through the hlaze of the explosions, he caught a momentary glimpse of the destroyer’s interior: The central chamber was a single room approximately three miles across, with towering vertical walls. Hundreds more of the attacker ships were moored in clusters around the periphery. It looked like the inside of a high-tech beehive.
“It’s starting to blow; let’s get out of here!”
The quick series of muffled explosions that traveled up the pylon-shaped firing cone were giving way to stronger and stronger blasts. Shrapnel and smoke filled the air.
As the pilots turned and raced to get out from under the destroyer, there was a brief, dizzying moment when their planes appeared to lose speed and come to a dead stop. But it was only another optical illusion, caused when the destroyer above them began to move. With astonishing power, the megaship accelerated to high speed in only a matter of seconds. It quickly outpaced the jets, leaving them behind as it streaked away to the southeast. Just as it began to lift away, a massive explosion ripped through the top of the dome like a shotgun blast blowing through the top of a skull. It hobbled forward at reduced speed until an even larger explosion tore away its entire left side. Still moving, it began to list and sink toward the desert floor.
Cheering and screaming, the surviving pilots chased it out over the desert, emptying their guns and using the last of their missiles against the dying giant. Exploding from within, it lost momentum and finally plunged toward the earth. It bellied out on a rocky plateau, bounced once into the air, then slid for several miles before coming to rest in a huge cloud of dust.
Through it all, Reg maintained his calm, professional demeanor. As a wild celebration broke out in the air around him, he climbed to a higher altitude and scanned the darkening horizon. He checked his gauges and flipped through the various radio frequencies as if he were just finishing up another day at the office. He couldn’t help taking a dim view of the disorderly air show going on below him. It went against every habit he had developed during his years as a teacher. Every channel was filled with deafening, whooping cries of victory. Ecstatic pilots flew barrel rolls and loop-the-loops over the burning wreckage, firing their guns recklessly as they went. Clenched fists pounded out their excitement on the walls and canopies of a hundred cockpits.
Reg tried to ignore them. He tried to remain calm. He fought against the urge to join the celebration for as long as he possibly could. But the revelry was infectious, and soon he was grinning from ear to ear. Then he found himself pumping his fist in the air.
“We did it!” he shouted. “I can’t believe it. We beat the bloody bastards!”
The giddy realization that they’d done the impossible, that they’d saved the planet from these seemingly invincible foes, surged through him all at once, and he found himself shouting and laughing along with the others. He got on the radio and added his voice to the sea of noise. He roared and laughed. He shouted until his throat was hoarse and his eyes were filled with tears, ecstatic that he was victorious and alive.
Order began to restore itself when Faisal began calling out a message in an enthusiastic tone of voice. He shouted happily back and forth in Arabic with some of the other pilots. Reg could tell he was delivering instructions of some sort, but the only thing he could understand was the name of a city—At-Ta‘if. By the time he found Khalid on the radio, Faisal was long gone.
“He says he’s already spoken to the king,” Khalid translated over the noise of the celebration. “We’re directed to land at At-Ta‘if because the king wants to congratulate all of us personally. There’s going to be a party.”
“I should bloody well hope so,” said someone with a Londoner’s accent.
“Is that you, Tye?” Reg asked. “I thought you’d be in Paradise with those seventy virgins by now.”
“Seventy-two, actually. No, not yet, Major. Maybe I’ve got nine lives. What say we get out of here and go see about this party with the king?”
“You go ahead. I’m going to wait for the smoke to clear so I can take another look at the ship, just to make sure. Did Sutton make it?”
“Hate to disappoint you, Major, but yes, I did,” Sutton said.
“Glad to hear it. You two follow the others to At-Ta‘if and warm things up for me.”
They pulled away, and Reg patrolled the sky, waiting for the evening winds to clear the dust and smoke away from the downed destroyer. He wasn’t alone. Twenty or thirty other pilots were also biding their time, flying laps around the crash site until they could inspect the kill. Khalid was one of them. He sounded hesitant and distracted over the radio, not like he’d just helped win a stunning victory.
“Khalid,” Reg said, “I thought you’d be off meeting the king by now. What’s the matter?”
�
�I’m worried about Faisal,” he explained. He reminded Reg that an hour before he’d disobeyed orders and deserted his squad during an attack. Even though it proved to be the right move, he didn’t know how Faisal would react.
“If Faisal’s as shrewd as I think he is,” Reg said, “he won’t want an investigation. He wasted the lives of a whole squadron. Besides, he got what he wanted. Mecca wasn’t destroyed, and now he’ll probably run around telling everyone that he’s personally responsible for saving it.” Reg chuckled at the idea. Khalid, who knew Faisal better, didn’t.
Reg thought about it for a minute and came up with an idea. He radioed Thomson, still at the tent in the Empty Quarter. Earlier, the colonel had mentioned that he was tape-recording their transmissions. “Thomson, do you think you can get me a copy of that tape?”
“I’m not sure,” he answered. “The tape doesn’t belong to me, and the equipment out here isn’t exactly state-of-the-art, but I can try. Any particular part of it?”
“The whole thing. And, Colonel, it’s important. See what you can do.”
“No promises, Cummins. I’ll see you at At-Ta‘if in a couple of hours. Word is that the Saudis have some planes coming to pick us up. We’re all a bunch of bloody heroes, mate.”
“Roger. See you there.”
The air over the destroyer began to clear. The sun had already extinguished itself in the Red Sea, but in the last lingering light of day, Reg and the others saw what was left of the ship. To their dismay, they noticed that roughly a quarter of it was still intact. When it hit the ground, the whole vehicle had splintered, cracked into millions of pieces the same way a car’s windshield breaks during a collision. Like tempered glass, it sagged in places but still retained some structural integrity.
Yossi was among the circling pilots. “Hey, I might want my money back on that guarantee,” he said in his thick accent. “Does that look like a total kill to you?”
“It looks fairly dead from my angle,” Reg countered, “and it looks like it’s burning inside. I wouldn’t worry about it. The impact of the crash probably killed anything that wasn’t nailed to the walls.”
“Probably you’re right.”
Both of them were thinking the same thing: Probably wasn’t good enough. They made a couple of additional passes, scanning for signs of movement, until it was too dark to see much of anything. Then they flew off to join the rest of the pilots at At-Ta‘if.
Inside the ship, large doors were rolling closed to contain the spread of what the aliens hated most: fire.
6
Victory Party
The airfield at At-Ta‘if served both civilian and military purposes. The swarm of alien attack planes that had pounded the place with bursts from their energy cannons didn’t discriminate between the two. Nearly every building at the facility had been destroyed. In the absence of electrical power, ground crews had lined the only undamaged runway with pots of kerosene and set them ablaze to guide the victorious pilots to the ground.
Reg, Yossi, and Khalid were among the last to land. When they taxied up to the damaged main hangars, there was a cheering crowd waiting to greet them. Their nationality made no difference to these people. The only thing that mattered was that the pilots had saved them from the horrible, ghastly invaders. The civilians rushed in to surround the planes, cheering and shaking their fists in victory. A contingent of Saudi soldiers pushed their way through the crowd and led the pilots to a fleet of waiting limousines.
“Welcome to being heroes, gents.” Tye was standing in one of the limos, his head and torso poking through the sunroof. He towered above the roof of the car like a sunburned giraffe. “There’s a party in our honor at the royal family’s compound. Hop in.”
They left the airfield and sped east through one of the finest suburbs of At-Ta‘if, Tye still hanging out the sunroof. But the trip wasn’t all cheering and smiles. Parts of the city had been hit hard by pulse blasts. They drove past working-class Saudis who were retrieving their possessions from smoldering buildings. In one spot, bodies were laid out on a sidewalk, surrounded by mourners. When the drivers slowed to steer around the pedestrians, Reg looked out his window and made eye contact with an older, unveiled woman. She was cradling a dead boy in her arms and wailing with grief. But as the limousine passed, she did a remarkable thing: She pumped her fist in the air and let out a ululating war cry in honor of the victorious pilots. Beneath the surface of their new riches and creature comforts, Reg realized that Fadeela had been right: The Saudis were still a fierce, desert people.
A short time later, they arrived at their destination, the royal family’s summer palace, and entered a world of nearly unimaginable opulence. Behind the heavily guarded gates, a broad swath of manicured lawn rolled up a gentle slope toward a magnificent white mansion. It was an architectural fantasy, part storybook European castle, part Arabian palace. A pair of domed minarets stood on either side of the ornately tiled building. The winding driveway led them beneath canopies of palm trees and ferns. AH the doors and windows of the great house had been thrown open, revealing that a lavish party was under way inside. Guests spilled out onto the tiled verandas and balconies overlooking the gardens.
Their limousine driver steered away from the main house and took the sweaty pilots to the compound’s Olympic-sized swimming pool. They showered in the cabanas and changed into the Arab-style clothing provided for them. The ankle-length shirts, called thobes, fit Yossi and Reg comfortably, but Tye’s was a full six inches too short. They marched up the hill to join the gathering.
“I feel like I’m wearing a dress,” Reg complained.
“How do you think I feel,” Tye said, his hairy, freckled shins poking out below his hemline.
“Don’t worry. Both of you look very beautiful and sexy,” Yossi joked without smiling. Then, looking around him, he said, “To have a garden like this is every Arab’s dream.”
The grounds were lush beyond reason. There was a greenhouse full of orchids. Pomegranate and citrus trees grew beside birds-of-paradise, date palms, and many other exotic plants. There were peacock blue tiles lining a circular fountain and actual peacocks wandering the lawn. Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces were parked along the driveway, and a group of well-liecled Saudis stood admiring an elaborate, man-made waterfall. Off in the distance was another building that looked like a French chateau. As the three men began climbing the steps to the party, waiters rushed toward them to offer golden caviar and sweet tea.
“I can’t believe this place,” Reg remarked, as they crossed the patio.
“What’s the good of owning a country if you don’t have a nice house or two,” deadpanned Yossi.
The elaborate main doors of the house opened onto a ballroom. Well-dressed men, and Saudi women with sheer veils concealing their diamond necklaces mixed with soldiers and pilots in loud conversation. There were more than two hundred people inside, but the room was large enough to accommodate twice that number.
When they saw Reg enter, many of the pilots broke off their conversations and came over to greet him. They were all heroes to the world, and Reg was a hero to them. One by one, they embraced him, some of them with tears in their eyes. Khalid was among them.
With a big grin on his face, Reg put an arm around his old friend.
“We made it. We actually did it.”
“It was a piece of pie. I mean cake. It was a piece of cake.”
The two of them laughed. Khalid stepped back and admired his friend’s new wardrobe. “You look good in Saudi fashion, Teacher. It suits you. But on you,” he said, turning to Tye, “it looks like a dress.”
A hyperkinetic American woman, wearing a wireless headset, introduced herself to Reg as Mrs. Roeder. Blinking rapidly, she explained that she and her husband were “event coordinators for the House of Saud.” She pointed out Mr. Roeder, a man in a suit and tie, who was standing halfway up a staircase on the far side of the room. He nodded back. She took Reg by the arm and began leading him across the room. “The scu
ttlebutt is that you sort of took charge of the non-Saudi forces during the air battle today and helped Commander Faisal out,” she said.
“Helped him out?” Reg asked with an incredulous glance. “I suppose that’s one way of putting it.”
“Well, the king heard about it, and he’s very anxious to meet you.” She glanced up at the balcony overlooking the party. A grinning elderly man in a white robe leaned over the balustrade and beckoned them upstairs. Reg recognized him immediately, having seen his photograph hundreds of times. It was Ibrahim al-Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia. Faisal was standing right behind him.
As Mrs. Roeder led them up the stairs, Khalid put a hand on Reg’s shoulder.
“Have you heard from Thomson? Did he get the tape recording?”
“He’ll be here soon,” Reg assured him, as Mrs. Roeder tugged at his arm. “Nothing to worry about.”
“I suppose I should say thank you,” the American woman said, speaking a mile a minute. “We all should. You guys were incredibly brave up there today.”
“All in a day’s work,” Reg joked.
“I mean, what do you say to a bunch of guys who just saved your life? Thanks, right?” Just as quickly, she was on to another subject. “Let me tell you something. It wasn’t easy pulling this party together. Everything is such a mess out there. It’s absolutely crazy. You try getting fresh lettuce in the middle of an alien attack. But the king really wanted to express his appreciation so we’re doing the best we can.” She was distracted by a message coming through her earpiece and stopped to listen.
“This one?” she asked, pointing toward Khalid. “Got it.” With a professionally ingratiating smile, she put her hand on Khalid’s shoulder.
“Sir, they’re asking that you not come upstairs. They’ll talk to you later. Would you mind?”
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