by Mark Alpert
Nicodemus and his soldiers walked along the limestone shelf to the other side of the chamber. As they carried David down the path, he noticed a shaft of light coming through a hole in the chamber’s far wall. His heart leaped for a moment because he thought it was sunlight, but then he realized that the color was wrong. It was bluish, artificial light coming from an adjacent chamber on the other side of the wall. The passageway between the chambers was less than three feet wide, just big enough to crawl through, and as they got closer David saw a large man standing in front of it. He was a soldier, too, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, and he saluted Nicodemus as they came near. But this soldier’s uniform was different from the ragged brown fatigues of the True Believers. It had a pale green camouflage pattern and looked crisp and new.
Nicodemus returned the man’s salute. “We found him, Sergeant. So now you owe us an apology. Didn’t I tell you that my men would track him down?”
The sergeant stared at David. “This is the guy?” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“I know, he doesn’t look like much. But he’s clever.”
Shaking his head, the sergeant bent over to get a closer look. He had a blond buzz cut and bad razor burn on his cheeks. The sleeves of his combat uniform were rolled up to his elbows, revealing muscular forearms covered with tattoos. In the strong light coming through the passageway, David could read what was written on the front of his uniform. On the right side of his chest was the name MORRISON; on the left, U.S. ARMY. On his left shoulder was a patch with the name of his regiment: 75-RANGER-RGT.
David started screaming again behind his gag. This man wasn’t some ragtag True Believer—he was a U.S. Army Ranger, a Special Operations soldier! David yelled, “Help me!” but of course the gag made his words unintelligible. Sergeant Morrison glared at him, then stood up straight and turned back to Nicodemus. “How the hell did this guy get the jump on Colonel Ramsey? He’s a goddamn runt.”
“We think he’s a spy, but we’re not sure who he works for. He may have ambushed Ramsey after the colonel walked out of the cavern. Our interrogators will find out exactly what happened. That’s why we brought him here. So please, let us through.”
The sergeant moved aside. Nicodemus crawled through the passageway first, then Hatchet Face. The two soldiers behind David lowered him to the ground and stuck his bound legs into the hole, but just as Hatchet Face grabbed his ankles and started to pull, Sergeant Morrison stepped forward.
“This is for Ramsey, you scumbag!” Then the sergeant delivered a swift kick to David’s ribs.
The pain shot through his chest. Closing his eyes, he went into a fetal curl. Hatchet Face pulled him through the passageway and David took an aching gulp of air. Then he opened his eyes and the pain turned to shock as he stared at the chamber he’d just entered. It was as big as an arena, as big as Madison Square Garden. The ceiling was at least a hundred feet high, lit by powerful floodlights on tall steel poles. To his left was another pool of greenish water, but this one was a genuine underground lake, stretching to recesses at the back of the cave that were so far away even the floodlights couldn’t reach them. Straight ahead was a rock shelf where two tents had been erected, a large one that was at least forty feet long and a smaller one behind it. And to his right was a natural staircase of limestone slabs, climbing about fifty feet to an immense upper chamber. David saw dozens of tents up there, and that was only in the area closest to the staircase. The cavern extended way beyond and seemed to hold an entire military camp. He could hear the voices of hundreds of soldiers echoing against the rocky walls. Jesus, he thought, what the hell is going on?
He was still gasping when the True Believers picked him up from the ground. They carried him toward the large tent just ahead, where two more Army Rangers guarded the entrance. The guards saluted Nicodemus as if he were an old friend, as if it were perfectly normal for a band of religious fanatics to come waltzing into a hidden U.S. Army camp. The True Believers brought David inside the tent and deposited him, faceup, on a plain wooden bench, the kind you’d see in an army mess hall. Nicodemus came forward with another length of rope and tied David to the bench. He wrapped the cord around David’s knees, waist, and chest, binding his whole body to the long wooden plank.
“You must be confused, eh?” Nicodemus said as he worked. “Well, I have just enough time to give you an explanation. You’re in Camp Cobra, which is a cavern occupied by nine hundred and sixty American soldiers. Most of them are Army Rangers preparing for a surprise attack on Iran. And their commander is General McNair, who happens to be a friend of Brother Cyrus.” He tightened the rope, making David wince. “McNair invited Cyrus and the True Believers to Camp Cobra, but there was a problem. The general had to explain to his Rangers why all these unfamiliar men were coming to their cave. So he invented a little story. He said he’d ordered an undercover Special Forces team to find Colonel Ramsey, a very unlucky Ranger who wandered out of the cavern and went missing a few days ago.” He gave the rope a final tug and tied the knot. “Then the story took a tragic turn. The Special Forces team discovered that Ramsey was dead. But they found his killer at least. And that’s you!”
Nicodemus pointed at him and grinned. “It’s a good story, eh? But now we’re close to the ending. Good-bye, Professor Swift.” His grin vanished as he spoke David’s name. Then he and his men left the tent, exiting the same way they’d come in.
The ropes were so tight, David could hardly breathe. He turned his head and surveyed the tent, which was shadowy and silent. Peering into the darkness, he saw electronic equipment—computers, radios, map displays—resting on tables that ran along the canvas walls. It looked like a command-and-control center, the kind of place where army generals could monitor the battlefield and issue orders to their troops. But besides David, there was only one person in the tent, a man dressed in black pants, a black jacket, and black gloves. He stood about twenty feet away, in the center of the tent, with his back turned. One of his gloved hands touched a steel pipe that stood on its end, anchored in the ground. About ten feet high and six inches in diameter, the pipe loomed over the man’s head, which was wrapped in a black scarf.
“Hello, David,” the man said without turning around. “I’m Brother Cyrus.” He tapped the pipe. “And this is Little Boy.”
THE PAIR OF HELICOPTERS LANDED IN THE DESERT, TOUCHING DOWN between the dunes. Michael was more than a hundred feet away, but the rotors kicked up the sand so violently that it stung his skin and pelted the stranded motorcycle. Blown free of the dunes, the sand grains whirled in a huge dust devil that obscured the helicopters, blurring them into vague black shapes. They didn’t look like birds anymore, Michael thought. They looked like giant tadpoles with propeller beanies on their heads.
He laughed. It was a funny sight. He had no idea why the helicopters had landed here, or who was inside them. They might be carrying Brother Cyrus’s soldiers, he thought, and the soldiers might try to shoot him again. But he wasn’t afraid anymore. Dying from a gunshot was better than dying of thirst. The soldiers would be doing him a favor.
He stood up and squinted, trying to see through the whirling cloud of sand. A man jumped out of one of the helicopters and started jogging toward him. He was a big man, that was all Michael could tell at first. And he was holding a rifle. A second soldier jumped out of the helicopter, and this one was shorter and slimmer than the first. They ran through the sand cloud and when they emerged Michael noticed two things. The first soldier had a black eye patch. And the second soldier was a woman. It was Monique Reynolds.
“Michael!” she shouted, throwing her arms around him.
32
ARYEH GOLDBERG’S CONTACT IN THE PENTAGON WASN’T JEWISH. HE WAS AN Irish Catholic named Joe Dowling who worked as a telecommunications specialist in the Defense Information Systems Agency. Dowling had no particular affinity for Israel, and no ideological desire to help the country. He’d become a source for Israel’s intelligence agencies simply because he felt that the U.S.
Defense Department wasn’t paying him well enough. So he supplemented his income by selling tidbits he gleaned from the Pentagon’s communication networks, usually news of American troop deployments in the Middle East. Aryeh didn’t like the man personally, but his information was always reliable.
“I have a job for you,” Aryeh told him over the phone. He used a customized satellite phone issued by Shin Bet. It had enough encryption to frustrate any eavesdropper who wasn’t in possession of a quantum computer. “And I need it done quickly.”
“No problem,” Dowling replied. “But I charge an extra fee for fast service. You know that, right?”
“Yes, I’m familiar with your fee schedule. You’ll find the work order at the usual place.” Aryeh had already sent the order to a Mossad colleague in Washington, who’d hidden the packet at the dead drop where Dowling picked up his clandestine assignments. The packet contained information on the DRSN call from Turkmenistan to California, including the estimated time of the call and the approximate locations of the sender and receiver. Once Dowling had this information, he’d be able to find the call in the system’s records and identify the personal codes that had been used to access the network. “It’s a simple job, really. We’re just looking for a name. The name of the person who placed the call.”
“Hey, I’m good with names. So when do I get paid?”
Aryeh thought about it for a moment. He hadn’t cleared this assignment with anyone in Shin Bet. He couldn’t share his suspicions with his superiors because one of them might be a spy for the Qliphoth. But Aryeh felt certain that once the mess was cleaned up and the traitors were exposed, Shin Bet would retroactively approve the expense.
“The cash will be there tomorrow, at the usual place. But only if you’re quick.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll call back in an hour.”
DAVID RECOGNIZED IT, OF COURSE. EVERY HISTORIAN OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY physics knew about Little Boy, the fifteen-kiloton bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. It was the simplest possible design for a nuclear weapon: just shoot a chunk of uranium down a ten-foot-long gun tube and smash it into a second chunk at the bottom. It was cruder and less efficient than the bombs that were built afterward, but it was such a surefire device that the researchers in the Manhattan Project had never even bothered to test it. They knew without a doubt that Little Boy would work.
As soon as David saw what it was, he started screaming through his gag. He strained against the ropes that tied him to the bench and yelled, “BOMB! BOMB! BOMB!” just as Lucille had done when she’d spotted the C-4 in the Turkmen depot. He screamed until he felt his vocal cords tearing, and then he screamed some more, hoping that maybe one of the hundreds of Rangers in the underground camp would become curious or concerned. But the gag muffled his voice and garbled his words, and no one rushed into the tent.
Brother Cyrus turned away from the gun tube and walked slowly toward him. David noticed that Cyrus’s head scarf covered his whole face. Only his eyes were visible through a narrow slit in the black fabric. He came to the bench and looked down at David. “It’s all right,” he said, his voice muffled by the scarf. “You can scream if you like. It doesn’t bother me. And it won’t disturb anyone else in the camp either. The Rangers believe you killed their Colonel Ramsey, and he was a well-liked man. They also believe that I’m here to interrogate you, so they’re expecting you to scream.”
To David’s surprise, Cyrus’s voice wasn’t cruel. It was calm and reasonable, even sympathetic. He was simply stating the facts.
“And maybe it’s good for you to scream a little,” he continued. “Maybe you need to purify your spirit. Purge your anger and fear, and think only of the Lord. We can take a special joy now in turning toward God because these are the last hours of the corrupt world. Very soon, His love will flood the universe.” He spread his arms wide in a benedictory gesture. “And you, of all people, should be joyful, David. The Redemption is just as much your doing as mine. The Lord called you to this task and you performed it well. That’s why I brought you here, to give thanks and rejoice with you!”
David shook his head. Who the hell was this guy? It was maddening to listen to him and not be able to respond. He wanted to grab Cyrus by the neck and turn him toward the gun tube and shout, Jesus Christ, what the fuck are you doing? But with his hands tied and his mouth gagged, all he could do was shake his head and scream.
“Think about it for a moment, David. Two years ago, when you uncovered Einstein’s unified theory, you gave us the first glimpse of God’s plan. I know you tried to hide the theory again, but while you went back to New York and your job at Columbia, intelligence agencies around the world began investigating the incident. I would’ve liked to talk to you then, but you and your family were under FBI surveillance. So I started doing some research of my own. I knew a few scientists who could help me make sense of the intelligence reports. And I knew that sooner or later the Lord would provide.” He held out his gloved hands as if preparing to accept a gift. “And He did. Within a year we’d assembled half the equations in the theory. What’s more, my scientists discovered that the equations flowed from a universal program that had been running since the Big Bang. They even managed to reconstruct a good chunk of that program. And I saw—praise God!—that the program had a weakness. The Lord showed me the flaw and told me what to do.”
Brother Cyrus sat down on the bench, his rear end a couple of feet from David’s head. He lowered himself carefully, as if his joints were hurting him. He wasn’t a young man, David realized. He was probably in his sixties. A good, hard punch to the solar plexus would be enough to take care of him. David jerked his arms, trying to loosen his bindings, but his hands were going numb now, pinned between the bench and the small of his back.
“The next step was to gather the tools I needed, but the Almighty had already provided most of those. I knew we could use Excalibur to exploit the weakness in the program because in my younger days I’d worked on the X-ray laser project at Livermore. I also knew we could steal the uranium from one of the reactors in Kazakhstan, and I was certain that the Iranians would let us test Excalibur at the Kavir site if we gave them some of the nuclear fuel. And after Michael Gupta joined our party and filled in the gaps in the code, we could determine how to properly adjust the Russian laser we’d acquired. Michael showed us not only how to overload the flawed program, but how to remake the universe as God intended, a perfect and timeless Kingdom of Heaven where we will all be resurrected and live in eternal peace. And you assisted us, too, David. Our operation had two loose ends—Jacob Steele and Olam ben Z’man—and you helped us eliminate both of them.”
Cyrus leaned closer as he said this and rested his gloved hand on David’s shoulder. The gesture surprised and sickened David. He twisted his body, writhing so violently that he would’ve toppled the bench if Cyrus hadn’t been sitting on it. The man retracted his hand but stayed bent over David, lowering his voice almost to a whisper.
“There was one last obstacle. To trigger the memory overload, we needed to intensify the laser beams. And the only way to pump more power to the beams was to explode a more powerful weapon. We needed at least five hundred kilotons, which is beyond what a simple uranium bomb can generate. An American thermonuclear warhead could do it, but how could we arrange to detonate the bomb next to the X-ray laser? Because of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, neither America nor Russia explodes nuclear weapons in underground tests anymore. And even if we could steal a warhead from one of the nuclear arsenals, we wouldn’t be able to detonate it. The permissive action links lock the bomb’s firing mechanism, and only the president can release those codes. So we faced a problem, a serious problem that threatened to derail all our efforts.”
He stood up, rising with a grunt, and walked back to the gun tube. He spread his arms again, standing with his back to David and gesturing at the weapon as if he were blessing it.
“But the Lord provided once again. He spoke to me in my thoughts, where He is always present. I k
new I had to force America to deploy one of its nuclear weapons. And I knew the president had promised never to do that unless another country launched a nuclear attack first. So the only option was to meet the president’s condition.” He pointed his gloved hand at the bottom of the tube. “My Little Boy will explode at two o’clock this afternoon, incinerating and burying this camp. And because the uranium in this device comes from the same stockpile as the U-235 we gave to the Iranians, the debris from the blast will have the exact same radioisotope signatures as the debris from the Kavir test. The CIA will quickly send reconnaissance drones here to investigate the nuclear catastrophe, and when they analyze the fallout debris they’ll conclude that this was another Iranian bomb. Which is perfectly logical, of course. Wouldn’t it make sense for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to use one of their nuclear weapons to eliminate the Ranger battalion that was preparing to attack them?”
David closed his eyes. The horror pressed down on him, close and suffocating. The nuclear explosion would collapse the cavern. The American soldiers would be crushed under tons of rock and dirt. And in response, the United States would launch a nuclear attack of its own.
“The target of the American retaliatory strike will be a facility near the Iranian town of Ashkhaneh. That’s where the Revolutionary Guards are storing the rest of the U-235 we gave them. The facility is located in a cavern much like this one, deep underground. So the U.S. Air Force will send a B-2 bomber to deliver its strongest bunker buster, a modified B83 nuclear warhead. The bomb is attached to a precise guidance system and designed to burrow twenty feet into the ground before exploding. And it has a yield of twelve hundred kilotons, which is more than enough for our purposes. We know the coordinates of the target, and in a few minutes my True Believers and I will go to Ashkhaneh to deliver the X-ray laser. We’ll position the device at the target point so that the laser rods will be close to the warhead when it detonates.”
