by Mark Alpert
Obediently, he turned around and dashed across the room. While he opened the back door and ran outside, Tamara peeked around the frame of the front doorway again. The two gray Land Cruisers glared in the sunlight, the farther one kneeling on its flat tires and the closer one lying on its back like a beetle. Lukas and Jordan crouched behind the overturned car, looking for signs of movement. Beyond them, the sand dunes stretched to the horizon.
A moment later, Tamara heard the rumble of the Ural’s engine. The True Believers heard it, too. Jordan lifted his head from his rifle’s scope and Lukas turned toward the noise. Tamara waited until the engine’s rumble rose in pitch and volume, indicating that Michael had started his dash to the south. She saw Jordan swing his M-16 away from her, aiming it in a new direction. Then Tamara charged out of the doorway, screaming at the top of her lungs and firing the Makarov at the soldiers.
Jordan’s head swiveled and his eyes widened and he started to point his rifle at her, but she shot him in the throat before he could pull the trigger. Then she aimed her gun at Lukas, but he ducked behind the Land Cruiser and her shot passed over his shoulder. Tamara charged forward and fired at him again, trying to get between Lukas and the motorcycle. If she could find some cover behind a sand dune, she could pin him down and stop him from taking a shot at Michael. From the corner of her eye she saw the boy on the Ural, barreling over the sand about a hundred feet away.
But then Lukas did something she hadn’t expected: he came around the back of the overturned car and shot her from behind. Tamara felt a jolt between her shoulder blades and another in the small of her back. The bullets pushed her forward and made her drop her pistol, but she felt no pain at first. She even managed to take a few more steps before falling. As she tipped forward she turned her head, hoping to see Michael again, but instead she saw Lukas kneeling on the lip of a dune and pointing his handgun at the motorcycle. Then the pain tore into her, ripping through her whole body, because she knew Michael wouldn’t make it. Lukas would shoot him and he would die in agony. And it was her fault.
She landed facedown, splashing into the sand. More pain shot through her torso and her vision blurred. She heard more gunshots, a great many gunshots, but she didn’t hear what she expected next, the sound of the motorcycle crashing. With great difficulty she lifted her head and tried to focus.
The gunshots were coming from the Ural. Michael had taken his M-9 out of his pants while riding the motorcycle and fired at Lukas. The big, ugly True Believer lay behind the dune now, clutching his right arm. Tamara felt a bolt of joy that was even more intense than her pain. Michael fired three more bullets that flew over Lukas’s head. Then she heard nothing but the blessed roar of the Ural’s engine, which grew steadily fainter as the boy sped away.
Lukas staggered to his feet. He found his pistol and tried to fire it at Michael with his left hand, but the motorcycle was out of range now. Tamara lowered her forehead to the sand and whispered, “Thank you.” Then she began creeping toward the upside-down Land Cruiser. She was dying, but there was one more thing she could do. She couldn’t move her legs, so she clawed the ground with both hands and dragged the rest of her body forward, leaving a trail of thickened, reddish sand behind her.
She didn’t stop until she reached Jordan’s body. There was a bloody hole in his neck, just above the collar of his flak jacket. Tamara used the last of her strength to fling herself on top of the corpse. She felt unbearably dizzy and was desperate to close her eyes. But she bit her tongue to stay conscious and hung on to the dead soldier, her hands groping.
Then she heard Lukas’s voice above her. “You stupid bitch!” he yelled. “You think you can stop us?”
Before she could reply, he stomped on her back. The heel of his boot smashed into her ribs. Then he grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled back her head. “Answer me, bitch! You think you can stop us?”
“No,” she gasped. “I can’t. But Michael will.”
“No, he fucking won’t!” he screamed into her ear. “I’m gonna get on the radio and report his position to the other units. And then we’ll have twenty soldiers coming at him from all sides. So you haven’t accomplished a fucking thing. You’ve just prolonged his suffering! And now you’re gonna suffer, too!”
He grasped her shoulder and flipped her onto her back. But she’d already removed one of the M67 grenades from the pouch in Jordan’s flak jacket. While Lukas had been screaming at her, she’d pulled the safety clip and the pin and released the lever.
Tamara clasped her hands around the grenade, hiding it from view. Lukas stared at her, puzzled, as the four-second fuse burned down between her palms. She didn’t know if she would ever see the Kingdom of Heaven, but that didn’t matter now. She smiled at Lukas. “You’re wrong,” she whispered. “Our suffering is over.”
27
AS NIGHT FELL ON THE EASTERN SHORE OF THE CASPIAN SEA, OLAM’S assault team departed from the fishing trawler in three Zodiacs. Each of the inflatable boats held eight commandos and a sixty-horsepower outboard, equipped with heavy-duty mufflers to minimize the engine noise. The Zodiacs cruised in a long line, spaced about a hundred yards apart. Olam rode in the first boat with David, Monique, and Lucille. They wore black pants and black shirts, and their faces and necks and hands were smeared with black paint. Most of the kippot srugot in the Zodiacs carried Galil rifles, the standard infantry weapon of the IDF, but Olam had slung an M24 sniper rifle over his shoulder. Lucille carried her Glock and wore a black wool cap over her mass of platinum hair. David and Monique carried Desert Eagle pistols that Olam had given them. David’s gun, tucked in a shoulder holster, pressed against his ribs, impossible to ignore.
They were approaching the strait that led to the Kara-Bogaz, a shallow gulf of the Caspian. A bridge ran over the strait, but luckily it wasn’t carrying any traffic at the moment. This stretch of the Turkmen coastline was deserted. Nevertheless, the commandos were silent as they drifted under the causeway, letting the current sweep them past the concrete pylons. Within twenty minutes they’d passed through the strait and into the vast darkness of the Kara-Bogaz. The gulf stretched a hundred miles inland but was only a few yards deep. Because they were now very far from the nearest habitation, they could rev up the outboards. Soon they were heading full speed toward their landing point, which was directly north of their ultimate objective, the Turkmen military depot.
Olam sat between David and Monique, his muscled torso straining against the rubber side of the Zodiac. He nudged David with his elbow. “What do you think?” he said, gesturing at the blackness all around them. “It’s like the universe before the Creation, eh? ‘And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’ And we are like the spirit of God, yes? Moving upon the face of the waters?”
David frowned. He wished he was sitting next to Monique. After they’d made love in the trawler’s cabin, she’d fallen into her somber mood again. They’d hardly talked at all as they’d changed into their black clothes and smeared paint on their faces. Now David tried to look past Olam and catch Monique’s eye, but it was so dark he could see only her profile. He shook his head and turned back to Olam. “We’re not the spirit of God,” he said.
“What’s wrong, my friend? Are you nervous? I told you, you shouldn’t worry. We will destroy the X-ray laser before the Qliphoth can use it. You will bring us victory because you’re the instrument of—”
“Yes, you told me, the instrument of Keter, the first step in the enumeration of the universe, whatever that means.”
Olam seemed amused. He cocked his head and pointed at David. “You don’t like to talk about God, do you? You’d prefer to avoid it, eh? You’d rather talk about forces and particles and dimensions.”
“No, that’s not it. I just don’t like it when people think they’re acting on God’s behalf. Acting as if God told them what to do, and now they think it’s their job to tell everyone else. And that’s the whole history of religion, pretty much.”
Olam laughed, a
low rumble in his chest. “For a historian, you’re playing very loose with the facts. Not every religion is so demanding. In my version of Judaism, God doesn’t give orders. He simply exists. He’s a presence in us and in everything around us.” He gestured at the darkness again, raising his right hand and tracing a circle with his finger.
David stared at the surrounding waters, looking past the silhouettes of the commandos sitting on the other side of the boat. He turned toward Monique again, just to reassure himself that she was still there, but Olam’s broad shoulders blocked her from view. The man’s mysticism was starting to annoy him. “If it’s just a presence, why not call it ‘reality’? Why create this concept of God at all?”
“Perhaps I’m not explaining so well. The universe is information, yes? I think we can agree on that. And God is the idea that connects the information. The program that brings everything together.”
“But why call it God? When you use that name, you’re implying the presence of a heavenly father figure, some benevolent old man who watches over the universe and cares about us. And that kind of God doesn’t exist.”
“Are you sure?” He leaned a little closer to David. His body odor mixed with the brackish scent of the gulf. “What do you think protects us from chaos? If there were no program, the universe would be a mishmash. Everything would happen at once and nothing would make sense. But the program chooses one thing out of all the quantum possibilities and says, ‘So be it!’ And though the choice might seem random to us, it is anything but. You, of all people, should remember what Einstein said: God doesn’t play dice with the universe. The program coordinates everything.”
“So what are you saying? That the program is conscious? That it has our best interests at heart?”
Olam shook his head. “All I’m saying is that everything is chosen according to a plan. Every movement of every particle. And in that sense, the universe cares about us. Everything and everyone is important. And that’s reassuring, yes?”
David shrugged. He couldn’t think about this right now. He was sweaty and disoriented and very frightened. He wished Olam would just stop talking.
The man patted his shoulder. “I need to speak to Agent Parker for a moment. Slide down here and take my place.”
He stood up and made his way to the stern, where Lucille sat next to the Zodiac’s coxswain. As soon as Olam left, David gratefully slid next to Monique. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even turn her head. But she stretched her hand toward his and clasped it.
Thirty minutes later, the coxswain throttled back the engine and the Zodiac slowed. David gazed ahead and saw a long black ridge on the southern horizon, running between the surface of the gulf and the starry sky. After ten more minutes the coxswain shut off the outboard and raised the propeller, and the commandos jumped out of the boat and began dragging it to shore. David and Monique got out, too, first splashing in the shallow water and then walking on a salt flat that crunched under their boots. Soon the commandos beached all three Zodiacs and headed for the ridge.
A narrow trail climbed the steep slope. David was scrambling up the trail, behind Olam and Lucille and ahead of Monique, when he saw a flashing light. Someone was signaling to them. This man was yet another of Olam’s Sayeret Matkal comrades, a Mossad agent who’d worked for several years in Central Asia. Olam had already briefed the assault team about the purpose of this rendezvous, but David was still impressed when he reached the top of the trail and saw what was waiting there. A herd of twenty-two horses stood near the edge of the ridge, their bridles held by local Turkmen boys hired by the Mossad agent.
Monique caught up to David and stood beside him. “They’re beautiful,” she whispered.
“They’re Akhal-Tekes, the golden horses of Turkmenistan,” he whispered back. “They’re supposed to have fantastic speed and stamina.”
Monique approached one of the animals, holding out her hand and speaking to it gently. Although she was a city girl, she’d done some weekend horseback riding when she was a professor at Princeton. David’s experience was more limited—he’d gone on a pony ride when he was seven and spent a day and a half at a dude ranch with his first wife ten years ago. But Olam had assured him that the Akhal-Tekes were gentle creatures and that David’s horse would instinctively follow the others in the herd. One of the Turkmen boys helped David into the saddle and held the bridle while he got the horse under control.
Olam ordered two of the commandos to stay behind to guard the Zodiacs. Another six were assigned to reconnaissance: riding the fastest horses, they would venture several miles ahead of the main party and screen its flanks, ready to radio a warning if they spotted any threat. That left Olam, David, Monique, Lucille, and twelve others in the main group. They trotted off to the south, heading across an arid plain toward the military depot.
It was the emptiest country David had ever seen. The landscape was relentlessly flat and the only lights were the stars overhead. He could hear his horse’s hooves striking hard-packed sand, but he couldn’t see the ground or any of the other Akhal-Tekes. It was amazing that the horses could find their way in the dark. Their night vision was clearly better than his. After a while he started to enjoy the ride, the sensation of flying through the darkness with the cool wind buffeting his face. The other horses trotted ahead and behind him, their hooves pummeling the plain, and he wondered which one was Monique’s. It was so exhilarating that for a few seconds he forgot all about the X-ray laser and what they were planning to do.
After an hour, though, David started to get saddle sore, and the ride became a lot less exhilarating. But Olam didn’t stop. At 2 A.M. a crescent moon rose above the horizon, and its light seemed almost blinding compared with the darkness they’d been traveling through. David could suddenly see the other horses and riders beside him and the sweat streaming down his own horse’s neck. And in the distance, about half a mile ahead, he saw a sinuous stretch of cliffs gleaming in the moonlight. It was an enormous, jagged wall of rock looming over the plain like the cliffs of the Grand Canyon. The moonlight illuminated the strata running across the rock face, broad bands of lighter-colored stone alternating with darker layers.
“Yangykala,” Olam muttered. He was riding a few feet to David’s left.
“What? Is that the name of the canyon?”
Olam nodded. “It means ‘burning fortress.’ Come, let’s hurry. Now that the moon is up, anyone can see us. Head for the shadows below the cliffs.”
A minute later they cantered into the shadowed area at the base of the rock wall. They rode single file, with Olam in the lead, entering a ravine that twisted deeper into the canyon. David saw towering rock formations on all sides, shaped like castles and temples and spires and prows. It made him feel a bit claustrophobic—the cliffs had an angry, menacing look, as if they were just waiting to slide forward and crush the life out of him. He was starting to wonder if maybe they’d taken a wrong turn when Olam gave a signal to halt the column. The commandos dismounted and David clumsily did the same.
Olam scrambled up to a rock shelf, then lay on his stomach and peered through his binoculars, which were equipped with an infrared display. To David’s surprise, Lucille followed right behind him, moving as nimbly as a mountain goat, and took out her own pair of binoculars. After several seconds Olam waved at David and Monique, signaling them to come forward. They joined him on the shelf, crawling on all fours. Olam passed his binoculars to David. “Take a look at the depot,” he whispered. “And tell me what you think.”
David fitted the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. He saw a building that looked like a small warehouse, maybe a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, sitting at the head of the ravine where the canyon dead-ended. The building was surrounded by sheer cliffs on three sides. For extra protection it was enclosed in a rectangle of chain-link fencing, about twenty feet high. “It’s a good location,” David said. “Very defensible.”
Olam nodded. “What do you think of the security?”
> “I don’t see any guards or sentries. But I suppose they could be somewhere inside the building.”
Olam took the binoculars from David and handed them to Monique. “What about you? You see anything unusual?”
“The lights are out,” she said from behind the binoculars. “The compound has floodlights, but they’re turned off. Without the lights, they can’t see if anyone’s approaching. Which suggests that either they’re very stupid or no one’s there.”
“Correct.” Olam smiled at her. “It looks like the soldiers locked up the place and went home. While we were on the trawler we scanned the radio bands used by the Turkmen military and overheard some unusual messages. It appears that the country’s president ordered his internal security forces to pull back to the capital for some reason. This might be a very lucky thing for us.”
“Or it might be a trap.” This warning came from Lucille, who’d just lowered her binoculars. “The soldiers could be hiding in the building, waiting to ambush us.”
Olam nodded. “Correct again. We must be cautious.”
He turned around and went back to confer with his commandos. Two of them detached from the group and headed for the storage depot, one carrying a pair of bolt cutters and the other holding a sledgehammer and a Halligan bar. Four other commandos took up positions on the ledges of the surrounding cliffs and pointed their rifles at the compound. Then Olam returned to the rock shelf carrying two more pairs of binoculars. He gave one to David and kept one for himself. “Now we can all see what happens.”
David trained his binoculars on the two commandos approaching the depot. Because the infrared scope captured heat emissions, the heads and hands of the men glowed brightly on the display. The commandos crept up to the fence and sliced through the chain-link with the bolt cutters. Then they slipped into the compound and scuttled toward the building’s entrance. Working together, they inserted the Halligan bar between the door and the frame and pounded it with the sledgehammer. The noise echoed in the ravine. In a few seconds the commandos pried the door open and rushed into the building.
