by Stephen Moss
- - -
“There he is again,” said John Hunt, full of frustration that he could not get to his colleague to help him. Could not at least tell him what he faced. They needed to work on a subspace tweeter network and soon. This lack of communication was going to be their end. He stared at the big screen impotently and decided to set his mind to something useful. Turning to Madeline, who had also joined them in the conference room, he said, “Madeline, I can’t watch this. I cannot just watch it. There is so much we should be able to do about this. If we had but one Mobiliei fighter craft I could have been there in less than three hours, and these helicopters and buggies closing in on Shahim would have fallen before me like paper dolls. Shahim would be home before lunchtime.”
Madeline looked at him, curiosity and a desire to avert his attention from the frustrating sight on the screen leading her to ask the obvious question: “What kind of craft?”
He smiled, bleakly, but then glanced back at the screen and his face set once more in frustration and mute fury.
Taking her arm and leading her to a laptop, “In my Citadel’s language we call them Skalm. They are named for a breed of airborne predator not dissimilar to vampiric bats. They are highly agile and famous hunters, often catching their prey midair and killing it with somewhat brutal efficiency with the four sharp maws that line their underbelly and wings. They have been synonymous with hunting for eons on Mobilius, a source of cautionary tales for our children since time immemorial.”
She looked at him somewhat squeamishly at the mental image, and he opened one of the laptops on the desk and pressed his finger against its USB port. The fibers in his hand jutted out into the port and found its metallic contacts, binding to them, and his connection was quick to form. With the equivalent of a mouse and keyboard directly plugged into his brain, he began to manipulate the machine, and images and designs began to flow across its screen. Madeline stared at the images and started asking questions, and in spite of himself Neal stepped over to them and joined the conversation.
Only Barrett remained fixed to the big screen, long practice allowing him to suppress the feelings of impotence that came from watching his subordinates, and often his friends, from well behind the front lines. He also longed to have the power to act that John was discussing with Madeline and Neal, but for now he would leave such hypothesizing to them. He watched. He watched as the black figure on his screen darted out from the huts, tracing a wide curve to flank the coming force. He watched as the hunted turned on his unknowing pursuers, bringing the battle to them and a part of him felt sorry for the troops descending on the small collection of huts. They had no idea what was about to hit them.
- - -
Lord Mantil also felt a measure of sadness and guilt at what he was going to have to do. He knew that he had to choose between the deaths of Jack and Jennifer and the death of these soldiers descending on them. He knew it was not a choice he wanted to make. Neither party truly knew what they were fighting for, neither knew what they faced. Neither knew that they were all, in fact, on the same side of the coming conflict. And so it came down to a simple choice between the hundred or so Iranian soldiers and the two American pilots. Simple mathematics should have led him to kill Jennifer and Jack himself and then leave the remains to the Iranians. Shahim could easily avoid soldiers on his own, especially as they would not come looking for him once they found the two pilots. But such things were never mathematical.
However misguided the Iranian soldiers may be, however justified their actions might be in the face of an illegal incursion by an American B-2 bomber into their airspace, the truth remained that Jack had been shot down solely because he sought to save the very people who now hunted him. And Jennifer was as innocent of the crimes of her captors as she could possibly be. Should she suffer an ignominious death for her unwitting part in the battle that had killed Martin and her copilot?
In the end it came down to one thing. Jack had willingly risked his life to protect others, and had saved hundreds of thousands in the process, maybe more. That alone justified protecting him. That the threat Jack had been fighting against had been brought on the same wing that had delivered Shahim himself to Earth only strengthened the Agent’s resolve.
These soldiers had every intention of capturing and then killing the captain and the major. Ignorant as they all were of the greater picture, it was time to choose a side and Lord Mantil had decided. It was time to fight once more.
Lacking the overhead view his cohorts were watching him on, he instead used his hypersensitive hearing like a passive sonar, listening to the hums and thrums of his quarry as they approached with the coming night. As he arced away from the small village, he triangulated the sounds of his prey in his head, picking out buggies and helicopters, and then codifying each one of the copters and cars by the minutest differences in the beat of their engines. Imperceptible irregularities in the walls of their thumping pistons or the explosive firing of their spark plugs leaving an audio fingerprint on each part of the faint cacophony that was starting to fill the night. He found them, he mapped them, and he started to plot their courses. Over time his map resolved; the longer he listened and the wider the range of his run the more clearly he could triangulate their routes. His path altered, his speed changing as he picked out the closest buggy.
A quarter of a mile away, the buggy came on, travelling at twenty miles per hour. Lord Mantil set himself to intercept. Thirty seconds.
The driver focused hard on the terrain in front of him, driving wildly around small rocks, shrubs, and ruts in the grit soil beneath his tires. The dusk was closing in, and the light his powerful headlamps were spreading out in front of him was starting to hold sway over the fading natural light. He switched on the larger bank of spotlights above him and his view brightened further. Behind him the gunner slowly swiveled left and right, the large spotlight mounted beside his machine gun following his sights as he panned the scene scrolling towards them.
Lord Mantil came in from their right, firing his legs in a final burst of speed as he approached; a blur in their vision. He leapt at the last moment just as the gunner spotted him, a shout rising up from his soul as the apparition appeared from the twilight. Lord Mantil landed hard against the steel cage of the buggy, his thundering momentum sending it skidding to the left. He grabbed the gunner by the collar and deftly ripped him from his seat, plucking his sidearm from its holster as he flung him, screaming, from the car.
The driver slammed on the breaks and the Agent used the change in speed as he was flung forward. Grasping the bar above the driver’s head, he swung over, bringing his two feet over and around like a swinging axe. But he did not need to kill these men, so he parted his feet at the last moment to fall either side of the stunned driver’s shoulders, allowing Shahim to come to rest facing the man, sitting neatly on the buggy’s small dashboard. Without hesitation, Lord Mantil neatly stripped the man of his helmet and sidearm and wrenched him bodily from the seat, propelling him out and away from the car as it skidded across the sand. No doubt both men would suffer a couple of broken bones to go with their dazed memories of the lightning-fast attack, but Shahim gave them little thought as he swiveled around and dropped into the driver’s still-warm seat, placing the man’s helmet and its radio receiver on his own head as he did so.
He was already gunning the throttle and swerving the buggy sharply right before the driver even hit the ground, killing its lights and relying on his acute vision to guide him through the dusk to find the buggy’s cohorts.
Wrenching the car around, he used the vehicle in ways it had never been driven before, cutting in a frenzied slice through the paths of other assault buggies in the platoon.
While he had been able to spare the first two, he could not afford such leniency with all of them. There were simply too many. Ripping the machine gun from its mount above his head, he wielded it like a scythe as he crossed each car’s path, his speed far outstripping the cautious twenty miles per hour the human driv
ers were managing in the fading light. He tried to maim rather than kill, but at the speeds he needed to drive at in order to catch them all before they reached the huts, even he could not place all his shots as accurately as he wanted.
One after one the bullets ripped through legs and shoulders as he bisected the paths of the oncoming trucks. The shots carved brutal paths through flesh and bone, and screams filled the helmets of the remaining pilots, drivers, and gunners as dark death swept through their ranks. It did not take long for them to see the pattern of their assailant’s movement in the order of the buggies being attacked, and the helicopters shifted their massive firepower to face whatever was tearing them apart in the night.
The light Shahed 285 Iranian Attack Helicopter carried twin autocannons and a barrage of air-to-ground missiles. They were homebred in Iran, and while not a match for their American or European cousins, they still brought vastly more guns to the game than the plethora of buggies whose drivers Lord Mantil was busy maiming or worse.
Shahim sensed the nearest helicopter veering toward him and saw it only a moment before its infrared-enabled pilot saw him too. The pilot shouted to his gunner. The buggy in their sights was going the wrong way and was coming at them from the direction of the death cries rattling their radios.
There was no way they were going to wait for orders on how to handle this apparition, and the gunner went weapons hot. Shahim did not hesitate either, leveling his machine gun and emptying its belt at the coming chopper. The pilot saw the muzzle flash in the distance an instant before the rounds started to impact his armored chopper. The sound was like an angry lead hail pelting the screen in front of him, which started to crack and shatter almost instantly. He instinctively veered hard right and responded in kind, his helmet-targeted front machine gun whirring to life as he squeezed the trigger, glaring furiously at the spot where he had last seen the buggy.
A thousand bullets ripped from the spinning cannon and raced toward Shahim, vastly larger and more deadly than the hail his popgun could return. Shahim’s reactions were fast but the fire was wild, and a storm of lead erupted the sand around him as it rained outward from the helicopter. The buggy’s sharp turn brought his left side to bear on the metal needles as they blurred the space between him and the damaged chopper, and the line of destruction that the bullets were burning into the ground scythed across the buggy like a chainsaw. The rear left tire shredded a moment before the empty gunner’s seat behind spat foam, and the next bullets hit Shahim square. The woven skin on his left shoulder ripped open as a hypersonic bullet bounced off the armor beneath and the next hit him hard in the ribs. Internal alarms sprang to life in his mind as his systems reported damage from the hits.
Deciding with machine rapidity that the buggy was now little more than a hindrance, Shahim propelled himself upward out of the seat, leaving the car to stumble onward into the night.
The copilot in the chopper was hard at work as well, sighting his first missile group on the car, he fired immediately, and two small but deadly heat-seeking missiles rocketed outward toward the small vehicle even as Lord Mantil landed in a roll and began sprinting away from it. Lord Mantil watched the rockets flame from the chopper toward him and then past him into the car. Their brilliant blue flames lighting up the ground and their smoke trails in the flash before they smothered the buggy in bright orange flame. Thud, thud, came the quick impacts and the car was gone, obliterated, not even a hulk.
Even as the missiles’ smoke trails wafted in the wind, Lord Mantil was bolting back along their path toward the helicopter, his cold machine body invisible to their infrared sensors and his movements but a blur in the twilight. The two men never knew what hit them, a weight suddenly landed bodily on the front of the helicopter and a moment later a fist came through the window with blinding power. They were both dead before their bodies hit the ground below.
- - -
“Jesus,” whispered Barrett at the sight. He couldn’t make out exactly what had happened but the results were clear. The image was grey and faded with the passing of the day, but he had seen the inhumanly fast figure from the huts leap onto the unsuspecting buggy, had seen two men fly from it a moment later. Then he had watched as the car tore bloody murder down through the ranks of the coming forces as they approached the huts Barrett knew harbored his friends.
He had then seen the first of the two attack helicopters in the squadron engage the man he knew was Lord Mantil and seen as it destroyed the car that had born Shahim down on his prey. But a moment later the chopper had visibly faltered in the evening air. Then it had become a slaughter. Barrett assumed the original pilots of the chopper were no longer onboard because he had watched as it turned its guns on the rest of the squadron. The next few minutes were ugly, the remainders of the squadron dying quickly as what was clearly now Lord Mantil piloting the chopper wielded the agile machine’s guns and missiles like a samurai.
- - -
Shahim watched his radar as the last of the terrified soldiers eventually fled. Shahim let them go, turning the helicopter back toward the huts. He landed in the deserted settlement and barely hesitated. In a matter of moments he had taken his two charges aboard and was on his way, flying hard for the border.
Chapter 6: Ghazzat
A deep heat lay on the city of Gaza. A dry, dusty heat that desiccates the bones and forces you to squint. It had been a long, long time since Saul had been outside his homeland of Israel. Indeed in some ways he still wasn’t. But though the Palestinian National Authority was hypothetically part of the nation of Israel, Saul Moskowitz could not have been farther from home.
It was not the first time he had been in Palestinian territory, but the last time he was here it had been under the orders of the feared and respected Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad. Plus he had been thirty years younger. He had been fitter and at the peak of his trade.
Since then he had gone into a form of retirement. He had reached a point when he had felt his sharpness fading, his skills dulling, and he had been faced with three choices: take a desk job in analysis, stay in the field until the day he finally met his match, or turn his long experience to the aid and guidance of the next generation. He had chosen the third. And so for two decades he had handled a wide variety of agents as they worked their way into the plethora of political and militia bodies that wished Israel harm. Even this job had faded with time, his age leading him to manage fewer and fewer assets in the field. Attrition had slowly whittled down that list, either through retirement or death, typically the latter. Eventually, inevitably, he had been left with none.
Until one had reemerged. The day Ayala had called him he had been stunned, but his long training had kept his voice steady. You can train yourself not to show surprise. To remain placid even during the most shocking of events. It takes a long time, and a lot of practice, but every agent learns quickly that the slightest facial tick or inflection of voice is all a trained spy needs to read you like a book. So you learn to keep a phenomenally tight rein on your reactions if you hope to live very long. So tight, that in the course of normal life you find yourself having to remember how you are supposed to react to important news, consciously triggering smiles and laughter as friends and loved ones share themselves with you, unaware of the calculated method behind your responses.
He had shown no such emotion when Ayala had called. He had greeted her offhandedly, and they had agreed to a meeting, using the long-outdated codes she had used in her time as an active asset. They had met, and they had spoken, and it had taken Saul a few hours to realize that Ayala, his former agent, had just turned the tables, and had activated him, the handler.
He had spent the next few weeks travelling around Israel, contacting agents, speaking with former colleagues, spreading an inoculating contagion that Ayala had given to him to administer. He had been spreading the antigen, and his work had gone a long way toward inoculating the region. But that had been but the first of two tasks given him by Ayala. He had also been given th
e name of an innocent-seeming junior officer in the Israeli Air Force and been told that she was the single greatest threat to Israel in the nation’s short and bloody history.
It had been hard to believe, and Saul had known that he was only being told half the truth, but he had also trusted his old ally enough to believe that the measure she was not giving away would not be something he needed to know in order to survive. Sure enough, she had told him to keep his distance, and he had. She had told him that the woman was not as she seemed and soon enough that had been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. Finally Ayala had warned him that the woman was part of something far larger, something that spanned the globe, and that one day he would know why he had been kept in the dark.
And when the world had gone mad on that strange autumn night, the sky alight with missiles and explosions, stories of deadly dogfights over Afghanistan, and nuclear hell breaking loose in America, Raz Shellet had fled. He had been watching her, as was his mandate, from a distance. He had used his not inconsiderable talents to gain an understanding of her movements without triggering any unwanted alarms, and he had watched, almost expectantly, as she had calmly walked off the base and vanished from her old life.
He had followed her. It had not been easy. He had not been prepared for her flight and had not been carrying any but the most basic amenities, not nearly enough for a prolonged pursuit. Most of all he had been unprepared for where she was going. But he should have known. Israel had allies in most of the civilized nations of the world, and information sharing treaties came as part of those allegiances. If you wanted to hide from Israel’s eyes, you needed to do so among her enemies. And there were few places with more enmity toward mother Israel than in the Islamic strongholds of Gaza and the West Bank.
The city of Gaza, the largest of all the Palestinian cities, held more than four hundred thousand souls spread along the coast almost to the border with Israel, only fifty miles south of Tel Aviv. But the trip had taken days, days marked by long nights and hitchhiked rides, at first with dubious and mistrusting Jews and then, as they got closer to the fortified border with the Gaza Strip, the rides had become even less savory.
