by Mark Alpert
One of the bullets from the M240 smashed into the Land Cruiser’s rear window. The safety glass shattered and Tamara felt a sudden blast to the left side of her face. Pain shot across her ear and scalp, and blood streamed down the side of her neck. She panicked, assuming the bullet had hit her, and almost let go of the steering wheel, but then she noticed that the driver-side window was gone. She touched the left side of her head and felt bits of safety glass embedded in her skin, but no bullet wound. The round had missed her and hit the driver-side window instead. She glanced to her right and saw Michael huddled in a ball under the glove compartment.
“Michael!” she screamed. “Are you all right?”
He didn’t reply. Her left ear was ringing and wind was rushing into the car through the shattered windows. “Michael! MICHAEL!”
“Yes, I’m all right.” His voice was low. “You should drive faster.”
She pressed the pedal to the floor. The Land Cruiser bellowed and tore up the trail, leaping through the air and bouncing hard against the sand. They flew past the field of industrial debris and the first crater, the smaller one that hadn’t caught fire, a yawning pit of blackness on their right. The machine gun in the pickup stopped chugging; because the parallel trail ran around the other side of the crater, the debris and sand dunes blocked the gunner’s line of fire. But soon they would reach the crest of the ridge and come down the other side and the two trails would converge at the burning crater. The other Land Cruiser and the pickup were working as a team, the Cruiser lighting them up with its high beams so the gunner in the pickup could target them. Sooner or later another bullet would streak into the car and the race would be over.
“Michael!” she yelled. “Do you still have that pistol?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“I’m going to tell you how to use it. First you have to—”
“I know how to use this weapon. It’s a nine-millimeter M-9, the standard sidearm in America’s Army.”
“Okay, great. I want you to fire it at the headlights of the car behind us.”
“The vehicle behind us is approximately a hundred yards away. The maximum effective range of the M-9 is fifty-five yards.”
“What? What are you—”
“The weapon isn’t accurate enough to hit the headlights, especially when fired from a moving vehicle.”
“I just want you to try—”
The Land Cruiser suddenly jumped over the crest. They were airborne for what seemed like an eternity and then the front wheels hit the trail and they were speeding down the other side of the ridge. The burning crater was straight ahead, a bowl of fire in the center of the windshield, growing larger as they barreled downhill. Tamara saw the junction where the trails came together, only a hundred yards away, and when she looked in the rearview she saw the pickup truck closing in from the southwest. Its machine gun chugged again and the bullets hit the sand behind them. There was no point, she realized now, in shooting out the headlights. The gunner could see them by the light from the crater.
The terrain flattened near the crater’s rim. After they passed the junction Tamara made a hard left, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and the pickup. Then she felt a tap on her shoulder. Michael was climbing through the gap between the bucket seats, heading for the back of the car. “Go over there,” he said, pointing through the windshield at the northern end of the crater. “Close to the edge.”
“Michael, get the fuck down!”
“The other weapon I took from the soldiers is a concussion grenade. I’m going to throw it behind us. But first you need to get closer to the crater.”
She glanced over her shoulder. Michael was in the backseat now, holding the grenade in his right hand. “Oh Jesus. Be careful with that . . .”
“I can time the throw so that the grenade explodes near the vehicles. But they’re far apart and I need to disable both of them. So you have to drive near the edge.”
This is insane, Tamara thought. But she didn’t argue. She was out of ideas and willing to consider anything. She cut the wheel to the right, aiming for the crater’s northern end.
She looked in the rearview again. The pickup and the other Land Cruiser had passed the junction and were less than fifty yards behind. They were trying to catch up to her by rounding the crater as quickly as possible, veering to the right and driving within twenty feet of the crater’s edge. Michael turned around and looked through the space where the rear window used to be. He knelt on the backseat, clutching his grenade and silently moving his lips, probably counting in his head. But Tamara saw it was hopeless. The other Land Cruiser was about forty feet ahead of the pickup. If Michael was lucky he could knock out the Cruiser, but not the truck. And then the gunner in the truck bed would start firing at them again.
Then Michael yelled, “Turn left!” and threw the grenade.
Without thinking, Tamara cut hard to the left. An instant later she heard the explosion. In the rearview mirror she saw the other Land Cruiser jump off the ground, as if it had just hit a tremendous speed bump. The car bounced on the sand and the pickup swerved to avoid hitting it. And then the crater’s edge fractured. A thousand cracks spread from the rim, and the sandy ground buckled. The Cruiser and the pickup plowed into the sand and began to slide sideways. Tamara stepped harder on the gas and turned away from the rearview, but as she sped from the rim she heard a low-pitched groan behind her. When she looked in the mirror again the vehicles were gone. The burning crater had grown still larger, with a new jagged edge at its northern end, and she saw nothing inside it but the insatiable flames.
22
“WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN, LUCY?”
The director was pissed. Although he was more than five thousand miles away, in his corner office at the FBI headquarters in Washington, his disapproval registered loud and clear over the phone. Lucille had to hold her BlackBerry a couple of inches from her eardrum. “I’m still in Israel, sir,” she said. “At a location on the West Bank.” Specifically, she was in a van belonging to Olam ben Z’man, speeding north toward Ramat David Air Base, but the director didn’t need to know this detail. If spies had infiltrated the Bureau, as Olam claimed, it would be unwise to reveal too much. “And I’m still working the kidnapping case. But we’ve run into a few complications.”
“The West Bank? I thought you were in Jerusalem.”
“Yes, sir, let me explain. I told you this case might have implications for national security and I was right. The guy we were looking for turned out to be a computer scientist who did classified work for the IDF. And he found evidence of a theft from the Lawrence Livermore nuclear-weapons lab. The stolen device is called an X-ray laser. The code name of the project is Excalibur.”
There was a pause, a long one. The director’s silence confirmed Lucille’s suspicions. She knew he had to be aware of the situation because the Bureau was in charge of investigating security lapses at the national labs. “I heard about that report,” he finally said. “The Israeli government contacted us last Tuesday and said they had satellite images showing Excalibur at the Iranian test site. But when we called the Livermore director, he said the X-ray laser had been dismantled and sold for scrap two months ago. And he had the records to prove it. So we told the Israelis they were wrong. Their analysts must’ve misidentified the object in the image.”
“Sir, if I may ask, where did those records come from?”
“From the contractor that did the dismantling. A small company in Sacramento called Logos Enterprises.”
“And is this a reliable source?”
“We have no reason not to believe them. What’s going on, Lucy? Spit it out.”
Lucille took a deep breath. “My contacts here have given me a piece of intelligence that they haven’t officially shared with Washington yet. The Israeli listening stations have been working overtime ever since the nuclear test, monitoring all communications in and out of Iran. Two days ago they intercepted a message from California to a location in
western Afghanistan, close to the Iranian border. The message had U.S. military encryption, but the Israelis managed to break it.”
“What?” The director raised his voice, forcing Lucille to move her BlackBerry a little farther from her ear. “They can’t break our codes. That’s impossible.”
He was right—the Israeli intelligence agencies couldn’t do it. But Olam ben Z’man had deciphered the message with that fancy quantum computer of his. He’d tried to explain the technology to Lucille before they left Shalhevet, but it was all gobbledygook to her. “Whoever sent the message must’ve screwed up the encryption,” she said, sidestepping the truth for now. “Anyway, here’s what it said: ‘RECEIVED INQUIRY ABOUT REMOVAL OF EXCALIBUR. GAVE THE PREPARED ANSWER. AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.’ As you can see, sir, the message suggests that some kind of cover-up may be going on.”
“Who sent this? And who received it?”
“Both the sender and the receiver used unregistered wireless devices. But the sender’s signal went through a cell tower in Sacramento, which is why I think you should take a closer look at Logos Enterprises. The receiver’s signal went through a tower in the Afghan city of Herat. I checked with a contact at the National Security Agency who said the Taliban in that part of the country sometimes use cell phones, but they’ve never encrypted their messages this way.”
There was another long pause. The director said nothing, but in the background Lucille heard him tapping his fingernail on his desk, which was something he always did when he was agitated. “This isn’t good, Lucy. At the very least, this is an unauthorized use of military encryption. And if there’s a connection to the Taliban or the Iranian nuclear program, we could have a real problem here.”
Lucille agreed. She’d been worried as hell ever since Olam told her about Excalibur. She hadn’t understood much of what he’d said, and she was reluctant to tell the director the crazier parts of the story—the data overloads, the memory caches, the universal program. He would say she was talking nonsense and dismiss her warnings altogether. But the intercepted message was solid evidence. It was proof that foreign operatives had stolen U.S. military codes and infiltrated a nuclear-weapons lab, which was a pretty goddamn serious security breach. And that was why Lucille had agreed to tag along on Olam’s unauthorized mission. There was a nest of rats in Washington, and some of them had burrowed their way into the Bureau. She needed to convince the director to start flushing them out.
“Sir, if I may offer a suggestion? When you assign the team that’s going to interview the folks at Logos Enterprises, instruct the agents not to reveal anything about the encrypted communications. They should just ask for more details about the dismantling of Excalibur. Then the contractor might get nervous and send another message we can intercept. If we’re lucky we’ll figure out who’s on the receiving end in Afghanistan, and then we can get the Pentagon to track them down.”
“Good idea. I’ll set the wheels in motion.” He coughed and started tapping his desk again. “Where exactly on the West Bank are you?”
Lucille looked out the van’s window. They were less than ten miles from the airport. If she boarded Olam’s plane, she would be violating every rule in the Bureau’s manual. But that was okay, she thought. She was planning to retire soon anyway. “I’m sorry, sir, your signal’s breaking up. I’ll contact you again when I’m back in range.”
23
BROTHER CYRUS REMOVED HIS GLOVES SO HE COULD HOLD THE DISK OF URAnium in his bare hands. It was only four inches wide and less than an inch thick, but it was heavy for its size, almost ten pounds. Dull silver in color, it looked like an oversize coin. Five identical disks lay inside the black case in front of him, each nestled in its own lead-lined compartment. Another case contained nine more pieces of uranium that had been fashioned into rings that would fit neatly around the disks. Individually, each piece was safe to handle. Because U-235 decayed so slowly, the disks and rings emitted little radiation. In fact, they didn’t even feel warm to the touch. The danger came from putting the pieces together.
In all, Cyrus had two hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium, which was far more than the critical mass he needed. He’d obtained the fuel from a research reactor in Kazakhstan. Despite all the American efforts to stop nuclear smuggling, tons of old Soviet uranium were still stored in lightly defended facilities in Central Asia. For the sake of simplicity, Cyrus had decided to build a “gun-type” device to trigger the explosion, the same design used in the Little Boy bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. He was familiar with the technology; during the early part of his career he’d learned the basics of nuclear weapons so he could better oversee the development of new ones. He’d been a cocky young man in those days, obsessed with earthly wants and ambitions, but God had been preparing him all along. He saw now that the Lord had guided his life from the start, giving him all the tools he would need to bring about the Redemption.
Cyrus put the disk of uranium back into its compartment, then rose from his chair. He was inside a DRASH, a Deployable Rapid Assembly Shelter, which was a fancy name for a large military tent, about twenty feet wide and forty feet long. At the center of the tent stood the ten-foot-high gun tube, which was anchored vertically into the ground. The uranium disks would be lowered to the bottom of the tube in a loose stack. The rings would be positioned near the top of the tube, held in a bullet-like canister. Bags of cordite would be stuffed into the tube just above this bullet. When everything was ready, Cyrus would order his men to detonate the cordite. The explosion would propel the bullet down the tube at a thousand feet per second, smashing it into the stack of uranium disks at the bottom. The rings would encircle the disks and the U-235 would go critical. The uranium’s slow decay would accelerate in a chain reaction, releasing the energy from trillions and trillions of atoms at once.
He stepped toward the gun tube and ran his hand along the steel. The design had already proved itself at the Kavir test site. Cyrus had given the Iranians everything they needed, including another hundred pounds of the enriched uranium taken from the Kazakh reactor. In return, the Revolutionary Guards had allowed Cyrus to test the Excalibur prototype he’d stolen from Livermore. The Iranian nuke had fit neatly inside Excalibur, the gun tube slipping into the fat silver cylinder like a pencil inserted in a soda can. When the bomb went off, Excalibur’s laser rods absorbed the X-ray radiation from the explosion and channeled billions of joules of energy into twelve powerful beams that converged inside the cylinder. By focusing on a tiny area, the X-ray lasers had challenged the limits of the universal program, pouring intense streams of data into specialized memory caches that had never handled so much information before. The resulting disruptions hadn’t been severe enough to crash the program—the universe, like man, was a stubborn creature, unwilling to accept the light of God’s love. But thanks to the code Michael had provided, Cyrus now knew the ideal beam configuration for overcoming the error-correction algorithms. Just as important, he planned to set off a bigger blast this time, which would intensify the flood of data into the caches. The explosion would be a hundred times more powerful than the Kavir test. It would guarantee the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Keeping his hand on the gun tube, Cyrus closed his eyes. He’d sacrificed so much to reach this point. And one last sacrifice was still to come. The world had such a long history of suffering, it seemed cruel to add any more in its final hours. Yet it was necessary. It was brutal and ruthless and cold-blooded, but it was the only way to end the suffering once and for all. A flaw in the program had corrupted the universe, and this flaw was the dimension of time, which was the wellspring of evil and sin and death. By offering the infinite choices of the future, time destroyed the perfection of the present, just as Adam destroyed the Garden of Eden when he chose to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. But now the Redemption was at hand, and the True Believers would correct the flaw. They would eliminate the dimension of time and make God’s kingdom unchanging and eternal.
Cyrus unwrapp
ed his head scarf so he could stand face-to-face with the Almighty. “Oh Lord,” he whispered. “Keep my will strong. Let me not be distracted by the wickedness of this world as we near the end. Let me think only of You. Soon I will lead Your subjects into the kingdom, and our resurrected thoughts will meld with Yours forever. Your Creation will be a flawless gem, fixed in the bliss of Eternal Life! From beginning to end, from alpha to omega!”
He continued praying for several more minutes, his hand on the steel column that pointed toward heaven. When he opened his eyes he saw General McNair in front of him, standing with his head bowed and waiting patiently for him to finish.
“Ah, Samuel!” Cyrus cried. “Have you been praying with me?”
“Yes, Brother,” the general replied, raising his head. His face was long and gaunt, but his eyes were a vibrant blue. “As it says in the Book of Ruth, Whither thou goest, I will go.”
Cyrus wasn’t wearing his head scarf, but it didn’t matter. McNair had seen Cyrus’s repellent face many times before. The two men had known each other for twenty-five years. More important, it was McNair and his Special Forces team who’d rescued Cyrus from the cave in Gazarak Mountain after he’d been tortured for three days by Satan’s foot soldiers. The general had seen Cyrus’s degradation and disfigurement, but the sight hadn’t made him flinch. Instead, it had strengthened the bond between them.
“This is a glorious moment,” Cyrus exulted. “After all our years of effort, we’re standing on the Lord’s doorstep! Very soon we will see His blessed face!”
McNair nodded. “Yes, Brother, I long to see Him.” His voice was fervent but his eyes wouldn’t meet Cyrus’s. He kept licking his lips and opening and closing his hands. His combat uniform smelled strongly of perspiration.
“What’s wrong, Samuel? You look troubled.”
McNair was silent. Although he had a reputation as one of the toughest generals in the U.S. Army, he was often hesitant in front of Cyrus. He’d done more than any other True Believer to pave the way for God’s Eternal Reign, and yet he needed constant reassurance.
