Maze Master

by Kathleen O'Neal Gear

  When the helo momentarily leveled off, Micah removed his harness, and waddled to the other side to sit down beside Logan. As he strapped in again, he said, “Excuse me, sir, but I’m hoping you can give me a heads-up before the briefing. Why is my team out here? Are we going after an HVT, or is this HR?” Micah knew nothing so far, but High Value Targets or Hostage Rescues were commonplace considering that northern Africa was filled with extremist training camps of every variety.

  Logan’s nostrils flared as he slowly let out a breath. “How much do you know about Operation Mount of Olives, Captain?”

  “Almost zero, sir. It’s above my pay grade. Though I’ve heard it’s operational to the north of us in Egypt.”

  Logan smiled coldly. After two years of working with the colonel, he knew that smile. It meant his words had been a gross understatement. Must be operational over a much wider area.

  “You’ve heard no rumors?” Logan pressed. “None?”

  “Couple of crazy things I didn’t believe, sir. Why?”

  Logan’s thin lips pressed into a white line. “It’s above my pay grade, too, apparently. Tell me the crazy rumors.”

  “Yes, sir. Navigator on a bomber crew told me his plane was loaded with enough liquid nitrogen to freeze all of Africa solid, and he said a woman pilot had told him her plane was carrying some kind of brand-new incendiary weapon. That’s all I’ve heard.”

  “Fire and ice.” Distance filled the colonel’s eyes. He sat quietly, staring at nothing.

  “Sir?”

  The chopper plunged into another trough, hurled them toward the amber sunset, and then scrambled for altitude.

  “Does Mount of Olives have something to do with my team’s mission, sir?”

  “Officially, no. Your team is tasked with capturing one religious zealot. Intelligence says he may have critical information about the plague. May even be planning to disperse it in Africa. His name is Abba Taran Beth-Gilgal. Your team was selected because you’re all specialists in some area of religious studies and speak half a dozen languages, including Arabic.”

  “So, Beth-Gilgal is Islamic?”

  “No. Follows some ancient Christian tradition.”

  “Christian terrorists?”

  “More and more of them are popping up. I don’t know why you’re surprised.”

  Micah just nodded. Actually, Christian terrorists had been around since well before the Crusades. In AD 414, the first pogrom in history was carried out by Christians in Alexandria, Egypt. It was a violent, organized assault that entirely wiped out the city’s Jewish community. His MA was in history, but his specialty was ancient religions.

  As he mulled over the new details, his gaze swept the faces of his team. Marcus Beter was grinning at Luke Ranken, who still had his face buried in the airsick bag. Beter did not have a college degree, but he’d been raised in a conservative Jewish home and spoke Hebrew. Beside him sat John Gembane, who contemplatively frowned out the window at the desert below. Twenty-five, Gembane was tall and muscular with black hair and serious brown eyes.

  Logan said, “Corporal Gembane has a master’s degree in Biblical Studies, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  On missions, Gembane routinely entertained them with biblical history. Last week he’d informed them that some early Christians believed that the serpent was the hero in the Garden of Eden. Through his efforts, Adam and Eve had defied the evil creator god, and reached enlightenment through knowledge. Beter had particularly liked that. He’d been afraid the crime that had resulted in the expulsion of Adam and Eve was sex.

  “Is that why we’re here? Gembane’s knowledge of early Christianity?”

  The colonel shook his head. “No, your team was personally requested by General Matthew Cozeba. I objected, incidentally. I think your talents lie elsewhere. We’re in the middle of a hostage crisis with a bunch of radical imams in Iraq. That’s where I’d have dispatched you, if anyone had asked me, but they didn’t.”

  “Sir, does this have something to do with LucentB? I know the World Health Organization is saying everything is under control in Europe, but—”

  “But you don’t believe it.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “No, sir.”

  “All right, Captain. The news is going to be out in a day or so anyway, but at this point in time, it’s still classified. The rumors are true: LucentB has escaped quarantine.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A week.”

  “But they stopped it, right?”

  Logan stared at him. “Three days after LucentB escaped quarantine it reached some kind of critical mass. It marched across Europe and all the way to Siberia in four days. Yesterday, the first case was reported in western Canada.”

  “What’s being done to contain it?”

  “The border wall will be finished next week. The president has dispatched armed troops to every border crossing.”

  “So we’re going to shoot anyone who tries to get into America?”

  Logan turned away and seemed to be watching the pilot, or maybe the terrain visible through the cockpit. “That’s the Kharga Oasis in the distance. That village on the canyon rim is your destination, Captain. The village of Bir Bashan. The planes will be coming in soon.”

  “Planes?”

  He nodded without looking at Micah. “You will be provided with new equipment for this operation. You’ll only have a few hours to learn how it works. I’m told a scientific team will be present to provide expertise.”

  “To train us on the new equipment? They’re going to train us in the field. Just before the op? Sir?”

  Logan’s bushy gray eyebrows knitted over his long nose. “They didn’t ask me, Captain.”

  Frowning, Micah leaned back against the cold skin of the chopper. This mission had clusterfuck written all over it.

  CHAPTER 10

  SEPTEMBER 25. 0200 HOURS. NEAR BIR BASHAN, EGYPT.

  The night air tasted disgusting, like a rotten latrine. Micah swallowed the tang and rolled to his back on the sand dune. Another blast of hot smoke rolled past him. In the moonlight, it seemed a living thing, coiling and slithering through the darkness. Somewhere in the distance, two “Whiskey” Cobras whump, whump, whumped their way across the battlefield. They were moving, too, clocking a good 280 kph. When the smoke shifted, he could see the helicopter gunships swooping along the canyon rim like ferocious black demons.

  Micah absently listened to his team chatter in his earpiece while he watched the darkness. The bigwigs had apparently called in every human with a “Dr.” in front of his or her name and rushed them to this godawful desert. Nobody knew why they were here. If he was smart, he’d stop worrying about it. His duty tonight was straightforward. Capture one HVT and evacuate.

  But it just didn’t make sense. None of it.

  Starting with his mission. The best minds in the world were trying to decipher the new plague; how could the leader of an obscure Christian sect in the middle of nowhere know something vital that they did not? Then there was the scientific team: Dr. Maris Bowen, Dr. Zandra Bibi, and a bunch of people no one had bothered to introduce. Why were they here? Oh, they’d delivered two nifty pieces of cutting-edge technology and given a crash course on their usage, but that didn’t explain why they needed to be out here in the field of fire.

  “Christ, what the hell did the brainiacs throw together to get the spray to smell like this?” Luke Ranken asked.

  “Some kind of Neanderthal shit.” Corporal John Gembane coughed.

  “Shit is right. Tastes like I have a mouthful.”

  Micah frowned and scratched inside his new combat suit. Lighter but stronger than Kevlar, it itched like crazy. Amazing material, though. Very flexible; when struck by a bullet it instantly hardened, preventing the projectile from penetrating. DARPA had been working on this suit for a decade. Just a few months ago, he’d heard it was still years before it would be ready. To make matters worse, they’d been vaccinated. Again. Less than twenty m
inutes ago. The injection site on his arm hurt like hell.

  “Hey, don’t knock Neandertals,” Dr. Maris Bowen replied, pronouncing it “tal” rather than “thal.” “The genome of every man here, except maybe Captain Hazor, consists of about 2.5 percent Neandertal genes. Most of humanity is a little Neandertal.”

  Chuckles eddied.

  “You serious?” Gembane asked.

  “Very serious.”

  A long pause.

  “… What the hell did you say your job was?”

  “Evolutionary microbiology, stationed in Leipzig.”

  “Where’s Leipzig?” Marcus Beter asked.

  “Good God, doesn’t anybody in the States teach geography anymore?”

  “Yeah, sure, you kidding? Give me a map and I can point out every McDonald’s in Kansas.”

  Corporal Gembane laughed, then paused. “Why do we need an evolutionary microbiologist on a combat op?”

  Micah unconsciously nodded in agreement, and looked over his shoulder, trying to see Dr. Bowen. Out there in the darkness, all he could see was a white face and short black hair.

  Bowen held up a small device. “Viral DNA analysis. Beyond that, you, Corporal, are on a need-to-know basis.”

  “Right. SOS.”

  Micah smiled at the “Same Old Shit” comment.

  As the Cobras shifted course and swung toward them, pools of bright light spilled across the desert, illuminating the blowing smoke, turning it a sickly yellow. Micah clutched his rifle. The stock pressed into the gas mask suspended over his chest. Just to comfort himself, he reached down to adjust the old S&W .41 revolver on his belt. The feel of the Model 57’s checked wooden grips eased some of his tension.

  “How come Captain Hazor doesn’t have Neanderthal genes?” Beter asked.

  Bowen replied, “His ancestors were sub-Saharan Africans.”

  “Which means what? It was beneath his ancestors to fuck Neanderthals?”

  “Correct.”

  Laughter erupted.

  Micah squinted into the darkness as another wave of acrid smoke blew over them. God, he hated Africa. In his opinion, it was the cesspool of the world: a place filled with dictators and diseases fit for horror movies.

  Micah’s family had stories about his African ancestors. The one his mother liked to tell on holidays was about his many-times-great-grandfather Levi, who had been a magician in the court of some pharaoh. As a child, that tale had fascinated Micah. He’d read everything he could get his hands on about Egyptian history and cultures. That’s why he’d decided to study history. His greatest lessons, however, had come on missions like this in the heart of the African continent. Over the past eight years, he’d seen atrocities that his brain refused to believe. Things he’d stared right at, and could not comprehend. Rivers filled with dead bodies tumbling over waterfalls. Young girls chopped to pieces and left on their family’s doorstep by “religious” leaders as warnings against premarital sex. Plague-stricken camps where every child had haunted eyes. He’d be stoned back home for saying it aloud, but he thanked God his ancestors had been stolen and taken to America as slaves. In America a man had a chance. Here, in this barbaric wilderness, human life had no value.

  He shifted to look over his shoulder at the scientific group. Corporal Gembane’s last question kept nagging at him. Why did they need Maris Bowen out here? Viral DNA analysis was usually done in the lab, not in the field. However, the new handheld DNA device might have made all that obsolete.

  “Hey, Major Bibi, what’s your specialty again?” Beter asked. “Some photo shit.”

  To Micah’s left, Zandra Bibi rolled to her side, her black combat suit making that distinctive, and new, scratching sound in the deep sand. Though they’d just met her, she’d become part of the team fast. Probably because of her off-duty foul mouth. Micah could just make out her tall, shapely form. She’d tucked her blond hair into her black knit cap, but wisps fringed her blackened forehead. “Architectural Photonics, you Neandertal, and you address me as sir.”

  “Sir! Yes, sir!” Beter said. “What in the name of Christ is photonics, sir?”

  Corporal Gembane answered, “Beter, I swear to God, you were born under a rock. DARPA’s InPho program? INformation in a PHoton. We had a briefing about it a year ago. You never listen.”

  “Yeah, I remember, I just didn’t understand any of it. I mean, how can you communicate in light?”

  Bibi said, “We’ve been communicating in photons for decades. China put up the first quantum communications satellite way back in 2016. Right after that, they started using photons to beam messages to earth. You know that phone you carry around in your pocket? It has photons embedded in the chip. This isn’t science-fiction crap. It’s everyday technology.”

  “What’s a photon?”

  Beter’s question brought wild laughter, too wild, from Micah’s team. Everybody was talking unnaturally fast, and none of them could keep still for long. Go pills did that. But at least they were alert.

  Bibi said, “It’s a tiny particle of light, Beter. Basically, I use a laser in my computer to write information in photons, then I beam the messages up to a satellite, which beams them down to a ground-based telescope that catches the photons and sends them to another quantum computer, where the message is decrypted. It’s the same programming principle as a regular computer.”

  Ranken said, “You mean quantum computers use zeroes and ones to create digital messages, like emails?”

  “Sort of. You’re right that a regular computer chip renders data in one of two states: zero or one. Similarly, photons have a spin. Up or down. So in the same way that I can send you a complicated email using zeroes or ones, I can send a quantum message using “up” or “down.” The difference is that with a photon the data can also exist in both states simultaneously, up-and-down, which physicists called superposition, but it means that photons can hold exponentially more information. Quantum bits of information are called qubits. With just my 150-qubit quantum computer, I can solve in seconds a problem that would take a conventional computer billions of years to solve.”

  “Wow,” Gembane whispered.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Beter said. “Sounds like another government conspiracy, like the JFK assassination or Roswell.”

  Ranken added, “Your problem here, Major, is that Beter thinks the height of modern technology is the flush toilet. If you were talking about ass-wipe, he might pay attention, but—”

  “Cut the stupidity, Charlie Two,” Colonel Logan ordered. “Ten minutes to mayhem. Get your butts in gear.”

  Micah looked up when he heard the EA-6B Prowlers heading straight for them. As the roars grew louder, the earth shook. Sand cascaded around his body when they slashed the sky overhead.

  “In case of communication failure, Captain Hazor, you have total discretion.”

  “Understood, base.” Micah turned to his team. “Saddle up, ladies. Show time.”

  Micah adjusted the night vision goggles perched on his black knit cap—with these, he and his team owned the night—and combat-crawled to the crest of the dune to look out across the battlefield. Orange glares dyed the thick smoke, marking the locations of burning villages. It looked like the goddamn Apocalypse. Getting to the small church on the canyon rim, capturing Abba Taran Beth-Gilgal, and evacuating was going to be like running an obstacle course through fleeing civilians.

  Over his shoulder, he called, “Ranken? You got that new scanner figured out?”

  “Yes, sir. Trust me, I see everything out there.”

  “Beter?”

  “Yeah, I—I mean I think so.”

  “You think so, or you know how it works?” Micah growled.

  “I know how it works, sir!”

  Ranken scrambled up the dune on his belly, and stretched out beside Micah. Sweat trickled down the sides of his combat-blackened face. He gripped the handheld tracker in his palm. The device was tied into orbiting satellites, which was old technology, but the new clarity added by the photon ch
ip was stunning. Not to mention the translation program.

  As Micah watched, the screen blossomed in full color, and he found himself gazing into the faded blue eyes of an old man with a weather-beaten face. He wore a white robe. Bushy white hair haloed his head. He was speaking Egyptian to another man dressed in white. The words scrolled in English, “… told him the vaccine didn’t work … he said he knew it already, and he—”

  “Oh, sorry, sir,” Luke said. “I need to lower the zoom. I’ve been watching this guy for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “He jangles my personal early warning system. Twenty minutes ago, he was talking to a bunch of young guys in white robes, like he was their leader. Pretty sure they’re a religious order. I think this old geezer may be our target.”

  “We’re supposed to acquire him at the church on the canyon rim. What’s he doing out here?”

  “Don’t know, but you should also be aware that one of our two-stars is standing in the open on the battlefield talking into a sat-phone.”

  Micah thought about that for a second. “Did you recognize the general?”

  “Nope, but he was alone, and something about that just isn’t right, you know?”

  “Understood.” His team was ranked the best because of exactly that kind of skill. They were all a little psychic, or maybe psycho. But a general standing alone on a battlefield in the middle of a firefight? Another piece of the night’s puzzle that he had no idea what to do with.

  “Should we notify Voldemort?”

  Micah nodded, and called into his microphone, “Base? Please advise on the two-star to the south. He appears to be in the field of fire. Over.”

  “Ignore the two-star, Charlie Two. He’ll take care of himself.”

  “Understood, base.”

  Ranken shook his head. “Weird shit, Captain.”

  “Yeah. No longer our problem, though.”

  “Aye-firmative, sir.”