Stephen Molstad - [ID4- Independence Day 03]

by War in the Desert (epub)

  “It looks to me like you care too much about this girl, Major,” Faisal said.

  “I’m a friend of the family,” Reg said.

  “And soon, a friend of her husband as well,” he laughed. “We’ve just now made an interesting arrangement. If her father agrees, which I believe he will, Fadeela and I will be married tomorrow.” Faisal headed back up the stairs, chuckling to himself.

  “Married? What did you say to him?” Reg demanded.

  Fadeela didn’t answer him. Instead, she and her friends hurried away.

  Down the slope from the royal mansion, past the swimming pool, was a large chateau, a gaudy replica of a famous French castle in the Dordogne Valley. The sounds of laughter, conversation, and music drifted out its windows and into the warm night air as Reg and Tye came walking somberly down the hill. The news that Fadeela was going to marry Faisal had hit Reg hard, and he was in a mild state of shock.

  “That poor girl,” Tye said, “trading herself away to save her brother. She must love him. I don’t know if my sister would do the same for me.”

  Reg was hardly listening. In the short time he’d known Fadeela, he’d come to admire her spirit, the way she refused to be dominated. She was tough, beautiful, and ruthlessly honest. The more he learned about her, the more he felt himself drawn to her. It was for her sake that he had found the courage to stand atop a water barrel and convince a hostile group of soldiers they should support the American plan to defeat the city destroyer. But now, only a few hours after deciding that Fadeela’s freedom was something worth fighting and dying for, it had been ransomed away.

  When they entered through the arched stone doorway of the chateau, they were greeted by a butler, who returned their military uniforms, laundered and ironed. The man led them down the richly appointed hallways, carrying a lantern to light the way since the electricity was not working. Reg would have been happy to call it a night, but Tye came into his room after getting changed.

  “Time to join the party, sir. Throw that uniform on and let’s go.” “Not tonight,” Reg said. “Too much on my mind. Besides, I feel like I could sleep for a month.”

  Tye did not find that answer acceptable. “Listen to yourself. A few hours after you save planet Earth from certain doom, and you’re ready to mope around your room and turn in early.” Reg looked at his watch. It was past midnight, but Tye wasn’t finished. “I know you’re unhappy about this business with Fadeela, but that’s exactly why I’m not going to let you sit in here by yourself. Let’s go. You can sleep when you’re dead.”

  Two minutes later, they were walking down the hallway with candles, poking their heads through open doorways to inspect the parties going on inside the rooms. Behind one of the closed doors, they heard Miriyam’s voice. It sounded like there was a party going on inside, so they knocked.

  “We are nobody inside of here,” laughed a man with an Arab accent.

  “Go away,” yelled another. “We gave at the office.”

  “Only pilots allowed inside!”

  Tye banged hard on the door. “It’s the police. What are you doing in there?” A moment later the door opened a crack and Yossi’s face, framed by his thick glasses, poked outside. When he saw who it was, he pulled the door open wide and offered a crisp salute.

  “Major Cummins, nice to see you. Come in.”

  A dozen people were crowded into the candlelit room, laughing and talking. It was a scene that would have been impossible before the invasion. Miriyam, an Israeli, sat on a sofa squashed between Edward, the Palestinian from Jordan, and a gray-haired Syrian pilot with his arm in a sling. Yossi, the Ethiopian Remi, and one of the Iranian pilots crowded around Reg, welcoming him to the party. Everyone was relaxed and in high spirits.

  They laughed and talked about what it had been like facing the aliens that afternoon until there was another knock at the door. It was Sutton, returning with a case of warm beer. He was followed inside by Mohammed, the crack Iraqi pilot who had flown so brilliantly. He looked different than Reg expected him to. He was in his early twenties, with a gap-toothed smile and a peach-fuzz mustache.

  “Good flying out there today,” Reg said when they were introduced. “Where’d you learn to handle a plane like that?”

  “Naturally I am a very great pilot,” he announced with a big grin. “I am an Iraqi.” The other pilots moaned when they heard him bragging and pelted him with pillows from all directions. Mohammed ducked and moved for cover.

  “I heard a nasty rumor down in the service kitchen,” Sutton said, offering Reg a beer. “Khalid’s sister is going to marry that bloody Faisal. If she doesn’t, he’s going to have Khalid’s head lopped off. It’s all anyone’s talking about. And get this: They’re going to have the ceremony out at the crash site tomorrow while the king’s having his photo taken with a bunch of dead aliens.” “Let’s hope they’re dead.”

  “Of course they are. Nothing could have survived that crash.” “It’s disgusting,” said Miriyam. “The way they treat the women in this country is disgusting. The men take many wives and keep them like prisoners and slaves.”

  ‘That is the old way,” a Saudi pilot said from across the room. “We young Saudi guys, we only have one wife. It’s better than it was.” He was trying to be conciliatory, but it didn’t stop an argument from starting to boil. Miriyam, the only woman in the room, tried to show the Arab men in the room that they were all sexist pigs. Predictably, they took offense, and the shouting match was on. It was still raging ten minutes later when Reg slipped out the door and returned to his room.

  He lay in bed for a while listening to the sounds of the celebration before drifting off into unconsciousness. Less than two hours later, he woke out of nightmare and sat bolt upright in bed. Realizing he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, he put on his freshly laundered uniform and went downstairs.

  The royal servants were busy preparing a lavish breakfast for the pilots in the chateau’s lobby. Buffet tables were piled high with food, but the only thing Reg wanted was black coffee. While he was drinking it, two more pilots came downstairs and joined him: Mohammed—the young Iraqi—and the captain of the Israeli pilots, Miriyam. The three of them sat down on plush couches beneath an original oil painting Reg recognized as the work of the French post-impressionist Bonnard. While the other two chatted groggily, Reg stared out the darkened windows trying to answer a question: The night before, he’d helped win the most important battle humanity had ever fought. So why did he feel so dead inside the next morning?

  He stood up, and said, “I’m not waiting any longer. I’m heading out to the ship.”

  Miriyam and Mohammed looked at one another in surprise, then followed him out the door.

  7

  "Into the Ship”

  keg, Miriyam, and Mohammed were taken to the At-Ta‘if airfield hy one of the army of limousine drivers who would transport the royal entourage out to the crash site later that morning. The first people they met upon arriving there were a squad of United Nations Peacekeepers. They were Frenchmen who had come from Somalia to help the Saudis in their “mop-up operation.” Their commanding officer, a man named Guillaume, was frustrated with the Saudi ground crews. They said the earliest the Frenchmen could be airlifted out to the downed alien ship would be that afternoon.

  “You have many helicopters empty,” Guillaume shouted angrily, pointing to a group of H-llOs sitting idle near a ruined hangar.

  “It cannot be helped,” one of the Saudis told him, glancing toward the heavens.

  Reg received a very different reception. A handful of the Saudis knew him from Khamis Moushayt, while many others recognized him as one of the pilots who had saved Mecca. They crowded around him, Miriyam, and Mohammed, smiling and shaking hands. There would be no problem arranging a trip out to the ship. Arrangements were made immediately.

  When Guillaume and the other Peacekeepers saw what was happening, they were incensed. “You can find a way to bring these tourists, but not for us?”

&nbs
p; Reg pulled Guillaume aside and offered him a deal. In exchange for the privilege of flying out to the ship aboard “Reg’s” helicopter, the Frenchmen promised to allow Reg and his two partners to accompany them on their trip inside the ruined city destroyer. Guillaume was a stocky, rough-looking character with a bushy blond mustache and piercing blue eyes that matched the blue U.N. beret he wore on his head. His face was full of small scars that looked like the results of a grenade explosion. He didn’t like having to strike deals in order to do his job, but he accepted, and within a few minutes, his squad of eighteen lifted off in one of the H-l 10 helicopters.

  A pink glow, the first light of the new day, filtered through the smoke and grit hanging over the eastern horizon. What was left of the ruined alien ship was still smoldering. It had come to rest in a hard, stony part of the desert, seventy-five miles southeast of At-Ta‘if. In the murky light, it looked like a strange, archaeological wonder, a ruined city from some long-lost civilization. The desert was alive with hundreds of trucks and tanks stationed around the perimeter of the felled giant. They looked pathetically small, like Lilliputians surrounding a sleeping Gulliver. The greater part of the destroyer had been flattened or tom away completely by the chain-reaction explosions. What remained was nothing more than a steaming jungle of carbon black debris.

  Reg ordered the pilot of his chopper toward the front of the destroyer, the only part that was still largely intact. This wedge-shaped remnant towered above the rest. There was a four-mile curve at the nose of the destroyer, and it was two miles deep. The roof over this fragment maintained its convex shape, but in some places had lost its structural integrity and hung like a heavy sheet of shattered glass on the supporting structures hidden beneath it. The whole thing looked unstable. Although it was only a fraction of what it had been, it was terrifyingly large.

  There are going to be survivors, Reg thought.

  “Fly inside,” he told the pilot. He pointed toward one of the large breaks in the dome. The pilot thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. The hole in the roof was the size of a small lake. After hovering over it uncertainly for a moment, and looking nervously again at Reg, the pilot let his craft sink into the opening. They dropped fifty feet and noticed something climbing the walls around them. The soldiers nearest the open door switched on the llashlights attached to the barrels of their assault rifles and took aim. They were surrounded by vines as thick around as a man’s waist, which was extremely thin given their incredible length. They appeared to be made of stone.

  The shaft they had flown into was seemingly without bottom, liven under the glare of the flashlights, they couldn’t see the floor of the room. Since the roof had been blown out, it seemed that a powerful explosion must have traveled upward through the shaft. There was no way to tell whether the vines showed signs of damage. A hundred feet separated them from the nearest wall, but the sense of claustrophobia was strong. Guillaume yelled at the pilot to take them back toward the open air. The pilot glanced at Reg, who nodded his agreement.

  It was hard to say whether the vine-structures were grown or manufactured. There was a regularity to the way they snaked up the walls that didn’t look quite natural. Reg hardly thought about it. He sat in the copilot’s chair feeling numb and heartbroken. The only thing he was anxious to do was verify that there were no survivors. When that was done, he would leave Saudi Arabia the fastest way he could.

  Outside, they followed the slope of the ship down to the main concentration of Saudi forces. Their path brought them to within a mile of the huge black pillar that stood like a monumental skyscraper at the nose of the destroyer. It was leaning now, held up by a section of the dome that had deep fissures running through it. But the gleaming structure itself showed no signs of damage.

  “That’s where we're going to find them,” Guillaume said, sitting next to Reg. “It’s probably their control tower.”

  “Looks like the tower is about to tip over backwards. I’d hate to be inside when that happens.”

  “I hope they are still alive,” Mohammed said, hungry for a fight. Instead of answering him, everyone turned away to look at the impossibly large scale of the craft.

  As the sky brightened, Reg could see the terrain surrounding the ship more clearly. They were far from the nearest village, and farther still from At-Ta‘if. The terrain was uneven. Acacia and other scrub brush clung to the walls of the wadis, shallow canyons formed by rainwater. The rest was low rocky hills all the way to the horizon.

  Ground troops had already penetrated into the ship. A spectacular triangular breach had opened at the edge of the craft, a mile from the base of the black tower. Trucks were driving up into the gap and disappearing into the darkness of the interior.

  Before the helicopters touched down, a jeep came speeding toward them from a headquarters tent. The man in the passenger seat was an older, rail-thin Saudi who stood straight up and held on to the windshield for balance as the vehicle swayed and jolted beneath him. He didn’t look like a soldier. He was unarmed and wore an ankle-length thobe. But his businesslike demeanor made it clear that he was an officer with a lot of work to get done. Before the jeep had come to a complete stop, he jumped into the sand and marched closer to the helicopter, keeping one hand on his keffiyeh to keep it from blowing off his head. Guillaume and Reg met him under the whirling blades, where the three of them shouted to one another over the noise until the Frenchman waved his troops onto the ground.

  When the helicopter lifted away, the Saudi addressed the soldiers in fluent French. He identified himself as Lieutenant Rahim, briefed them on the situation inside the destroyer, and said that he would personally lead them inside for a look around. He made it clear that the Peacekeepers would be asked to leave once they had determined there were no survivors, because the king had declared the crash site a national military facility. When he was finished speaking, he turned to Reg and asked, in English, if there were any questions. Reg shook his head no.

  “What did he say?” Miriyam asked one of the Peacekeepers.

  “He said the aliens are all dead.”

  A troop truck lumbered forward, and the men piled in, taking positions on facing benches. There were no seats left by the time Reg and Miriyam followed Mohammed up the steps, so they decided to stand. They quickly thought better of it once the big Truck began lurching over the bumpy earth. They immediately sat down on the floor of the truck and ended up clutching the legs of the soldiers to keep from being thrown around. Lieutenant Rahim was a man in a hurry to overcome some serious obstacles, at least lhat’s how he drove. He smashed into potholes and ran down the banks of ten-foot-deep wadis while turned halfway around in his seat briefing the soldiers on the situation. The U.N. squad held on tightly and listened to him yell over the grind of the engine, their powder blue jumpsuits matching the early sky lightening above them. They were a seasoned group of professional soldiers who worked so well together they hardly had to speak. Reg felt like they would be able to take care of business if it came to that.

  When the truck arrived on flatter ground, the baby-faced soldier whose leg Reg was holding, bent forward and asked a question. “Does this mean we are in love?” His comrades all burst out laughing. His name was Richaud, the joker of the squad. Reg sat back, a little embarrassed. Another man nudged him with a boot, the squad’s medical officer. He looked down at Reg and shook his head.

  “Your skin is very red, too much sun. Put your hand out.” He uncapped a tube of ointment and squeezed some out. Reg thanked him and put it on. “You three look pretty funny down there. How did you come together?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  The man's name was LeBlanc. He had a stray eye, said he was a medical doctor, and had the curiosity of a ferret. He kept glancing ahead, anxious for the encounter to begin.

  As they approached the giant triangular break in the wall of the destroyer, the huge bulk of it hung over them, hundreds of times the size of Saudi Arabia’s largest supertanker. The way up into the ship was via
a steep, uneven pile of rubble. Debris had spilled out of the opening, creating a natural ramp. A man directing traffic at the foot of the slope raised a red flag and brought Rahim’s wild ride to a temporary halt. The path up the ramp could only accommodate one-way traffic, and a convoy was coming down at that moment. Two pickup trucks and a jeep were moving slowly and carefully along the treacherous path. As they sat there idling, Reg was sure Rahim wasn’t going to be as cautious. As the vehicles got to the end of the ramp, Rahim released the emergency brake and lurched forward. But when he saw what was tied to the front of the jeep, he hit the brakes again.

  The next moment, everyone was craning their necks to see. The men in the jeep had a carcass tied across the hood, like deer hunters returning home successful. It was a gray bulky mass that looked like a giant crustacean shell, except that it had a stump of a face. Long bony arms and legs mingled with the ropes, as well as a profusion of thick tentacles, some of which had worked their way free and were dragging along behind the wheels. The body seemed too thin to support the heavy, scalloped shell of its head and thorax, but the limbs looked strong. They were muscular and covered by an exoskeleton. Stretched over the engine of the jeep, the alien’s body was nearly ten feet long and the color of a freshly unearthed grab. Guillaume yelled at his troops to stay where they were as he and Rahim jumped out to have a look. After a moment, the jeep took off to the north. Reg could see that it was headed toward the area a couple of miles away that was being prepared for the royal photo op. It didn’t surprise him when Guillaume returned and explained that since the corpse was in good shape compared to most the Saudis were finding, it was going to be used in the ceremony.

  Instead of driving up the ramp and into the ship, Rahim ground his engine into gear and turned south, following the two trucks. A few hundred yards later, they came to the place where the Saudi army was dumping the alien bodies. It was a quarantine area, and a stench like ammonia was thick in the air. Everyone got out of the truck and walked up to a roadblock that was guarded by a pair of Pakistani men in turbans.