“Incredible! It worked!” Sutton shouted. He patted Mohammed on the shoulder. “He went boom!”
“Don’t be too happy,” Edward cautioned. “There are three more, and they’re coming this way.”
Sutton stole a glance over the wall and realized he was right. “Don’t these things learn?”
“Let’s hope not,” Edward said. Then he turned to Yossi, who was staring at him, impressed, and explained his skill with Molotov cocktails. “I got some practice during the Intifada.”
The Israeli lit a couple more of the wicks. “This time. I won’t throw like your grandmother. I’ll pretend I’m throwing at Yasir Arafat.”
The attack continued. The aliens followed their strategy of trying to surround the soldiers, but it wasn’t enough. The men spread out and torched the creatures wherever they tried to cross the wall.
Half an hour later, all the aliens in Qal’at Buqum were dead. Those who had defended the oasis gathered near the post office, comparing notes and carrying the wounded to an infirmary at the end of town. Despite their victory and the fact that they’d found a reliable way of killing the invaders, there was only a guarded optimism. The officer in charge of the Saudi forces, fearing another sneak attack, sent dozens of men to stand sentry duty around the perimeter of the oasis.
In the strategy session that ensued, much of the discussion centered on acquiring the right weapons—flamethrowers. The Saudis had them, of course, but not many. None of the men milling around the center of town had ever trained w'ith one. Locating them and getting them to where they were needed was going to take time.
Reg went to the Rolls-Royce and found Mr. Yamani exactly where he’d been since they arrived in Qal’at Buqum an hour before. He was curled up on the backseat with his arms wrapped around his head. Reg ducked inside to try and reassure the old man that he was safe, at least for the time being, but couldn’t get a response out of him. He was trembling and mumbling to himself in Arabic. Khalid came up behind Reg and was angry that Fadeela had left her father in such a state.
Someone told them she had gone to the infirmary, and Reg volunteered to go and look for her. He walked down the road to the edge of town until he found the building. It was a dilapidated doctor’s office that was ill equipped to handle the dozens of injuries sustained during the battle. He found the doctor in charge, a man who wore slacks and a silk shirt instead of the more traditional Saudi garments. He spoke English with a Scottish accent.
“She said her father was uncontrollably nervous and wanted something to calm him down. I kicked her out and told her not to come back until she was decently covered.” Then he looked Reg over disapprovingly. “Why do you want to find her?” Reg didn’t answer the man, just turned and left. As soon as he was on the street again, he saw the old truck coming in his direction. Miriyam and Remi were riding up front with Ali, who was driving.
“Hurry up and get in,” Miriyam said. “We’re going to a place where we can get some weapons.”
“What’s the big hurry?” Reg asked, glancing toward the center of town. A large convoy of military vehicles had begun to arrive.
“It’s Faisal. He has taken Khalid prisoner again, and he’s looking for you. Get in.”
There didn’t seem to be much choice, so Reg jumped in the rear compartment and watched the oasis town slowly recede from view. When he finally sat down, he noticed there was a man he didn’t recognize riding along with them. It was a Saudi soldier with his keffiyeh pushed down to cover his face. There was something oddly fragile about the soldier, and when “he” finally looked up and smiled, Reg saw that it wasn’t a man after all. It was Fadeela.
10
Ugly Weapons
As they motored east along a lonely stretch of highway, the only traffic they encountered was a convoy of military jeeps heading in the opposite direction and a Saudi army helicopter that buzzed up behind them before shooting ahead. It was about three in the afternoon, and the sun was at its most punishing. In the back of the truck, the breeze kept skin temperatures down, but the metal floor and walls were hot to the touch.
Tye hardly noticed. He had spread some rags on the floor near the tailgate and was busy examining his growing collection of alien biohardware. In the aftermath of the battle, he’d dislodged two more medallions from the backs of alien hands. But his concentration was centered on the examination of something that looked like a slightly waiped piece of half-inch pipe. It was one of the pulse weapons.
Using a heavy stone, he’d broken open an exoskeleton forearm and dug the thing out. It lay just below the shell, nestled in the ropy white meat. Although it was the color and consistency of tooth enamel, the tube had soft flanges attached to its sides. He had found them wrapped around the muscles in the arm, and they had to be peeled away one by one before the weapon could be lifted out of its resting place. These flanges were about three inches long and one inch wide. They were flat and resembled the rubbery leaves of seaweed, but were the color of copper and composed of the same material found on the backs of the medallions. The pulse weapon looked more like a skinny prehistoric fish than any kind of gun he'd ever seen. It was hollow and open at the end where the ball of condensed energy was expelled. The other end was swollen and green—the same shade of green he’d seen flying along the underside of the city destroyer. The same green, Reg told him, as the crystalline pillars growing in the bowels of the ship.
“That thing is disgusting,” Sutton told him. “Don’t touch it. It’s probably full of germs.”
“I wiped it off,” Tye said. “It’s not like it’s rotting meat or anything. It’s some kind of machine.” The other passengers had a hard time buying that. It didn’t look like a machine.
“I don’t like it,” Edward said. “Remember when the Americans brought back rocks from Mars? The newspapers talked about the danger of germs or bacteria that we can’t defend against. And that was only rocks; this thing came out of a body.” For once Yossi agreed with something Edward had to say. “I think we should get rid of it. It could be poison. Why take the risk?”
“If it’s true,” Fadeela said, “that the aliens have some strange diseases, it’s already too late. Thousands of people throughout the country must have already been exposed to them. And we don’t even know about the rest of the world.”
The debate ended when Tye reached down and picked the thing up with his bare hand. The coppery flanges came to life and wrapped themselves around his arm, strapping the machine to his forearm. Startled by the rapid movement, the others recoiled, but Tye was more fascinated than afraid. He lifted his forearm close to his face and examined it closely before turning to the others. “I think it likes me.”
“See if you can make it fire,” Reg said.
Since there was nothing that looked like a trigger, Tye did as he’d seen the aliens do. He pointed his arm out the back of the truck and extended his finger. Nothing happened. He picked up one of the medallions and touched the coppery side to various parts of the device. He peeled it off and allowed it to reattach to his other arm. He flexed his muscles and shouted, “Fire!” but couldn’t get the weapon to work. He turned to the others and shrugged. “Maybe you have to be eight feet tall and really, really ugly for it to work.”
“If that’s the case,” Sutton joked, “you’ re our best candidate.”
“Let me try it,” Reg said, moving closer and reaching for the device.
Tye pulled away, not ready to relinquish control of the object. “This one’s mine. You’ll have to go out and find your own.” He was only half kidding.
Reg explained his theory that the way to trigger the firing mechanism might involve some sort of telepathy or mental suggestion. “I’ve been thinking about these suits of armor they wear. How do (hey control them? It can’t be that the suits are imitating the movements of the little guy operating them. For one thing, there’s no room to move inside those chest cavities. And besides, the aliens don’t have tentacles, but their suits do. It might be a simple matter of
willing it to work. Let me see it for a minute.”
Again, Tye pulled it away from Reg. “I’ve got plenty of mental control. I’ll try it.” He raised his arm and pointed his finger, Ihis time with more ceremony. Speaking like a medium conducting a seance, he said, “I command you to fire a pulse blast. I am visualizing a pulse blast firing out of you. I command you to fire!” He was perfectly sincere, but some of the others began laughing at him.
“Oh ferchrissake, man, give me that thing.”
Fadeela spoke on Reg’s behalf. “Michael, let Reg try it. He has been inside their minds twice already. Perhaps he can make it work.”
Sutton was enjoying the show. “Do you have any idea how ridiculous you people look? May I remind you that this thing is from another galaxy, designed by an intelligence we don’t understand?”
“Oh, go ahead,” Tye said, holding his arm out so Reg could peel the rubbery flippers away from his skin. The instant Reg’s fingertips came into contact with the device, there was a blinding flash. An energy pulse sailed into the sky for a mile or so before dissipating.
“Okay, you win.” Tye peeled the tube off his arm, set it on the floor of the truck, and pushed it toward Reg. “Whatever you got from those aliens, it works.”
Reg held the thing over his arm and allowed it to cling to him. His sweat quickly collected in pools under the flippers, which clung to his arm like clammy leaves. He willed the device to fire again, but had no more luck than Tye.
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 Ihis 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 ihem 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 finish
ed, 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 comer of the building, and peered around it.
“What the hell are we doing?” Sutton asked nervously. “This place looks like a plant nursery. Let them 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 bum 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.
Stephen Molstad - [ID4- Independence Day 03] Page 21