Stephen Molstad - [ID4- Independence Day 03]

by War in the Desert (epub)

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Yes, sir, yes.”

  After inspecting the extraterrestrial cadaver, the king had lost his appetite for confrontations with any living members of the species. The size and strength of the body he’d seen were alarming. He wondered if the ammonia fumes he’d breathed might be poisonous. The idea of coming out here was beginning to feel like a huge mistake. “General, send search parties inside to check this man’s story. Call me the moment you have news.” The patriarch scanned the curved dome of the ship for a moment before making an announcement. “This isn’t what I was expecting! It isn’t right. We are going back to At-Ta‘if.”

  “What about the wedding?” asked an advisor.

  Ibrahim growled. He’d forgotten about that. He marched off in a new direction, this time to find Faisal.

  The groom-to-be had slipped a gold-trimmed robe over his uniform and was surrounded by a group of fawning well-wishers, who parted for the king when he approached.

  “Faisal," the old man said, “I have changed my mind. Let’s return to the palace and hold the ceremony in my gardens.”

  Faisal was mortified at the idea. A ceremony in the desert was the final brilliant element of the story he was constructing for himself. When future generations recounted his heroic deeds, he wanted it to end with the storybook flourish of a battlefield wedding. .. . Then, after laying low the enemies of God, the warrior knelt before the site of his victory and took as his reward the most beautiful bride in all the land. The king himself performed the marriage, whereupon Faisal, in his wisdom and mercy, freed the bride’s brother after lecturing him sternly before the people. ... Thinking fast, Faisal proposed the compromise of dispensing with the formal ceremony. All that was necessary was for the king to stand over the couple and declare them man and wife.

  King Ibrahim wasn’t happy with the proposal, but he agreed. “Bring that Yamani girl up here,” he shouted, “so we can finish this business and go home.”

  When the bride’s chauffeur opened the door, the shrouded figure that stepped out wasn’t Fadeela. It was Faisal’s wife, Hajami. She was five years older than her husband and, under normal circumstances, a timid personality. She had been rich when she married the ambitious young Saudi Air Force lieutenant from a penniless family who had promised her that she would always be his only wife. She had given him her fortune and three male children. The night before, when she learned of Fadeela’s marriage proposal, she had argued savagely with her husband. Then, after Fadeela’s friends decided to boycott the wedding, Faisal added insult to Hajami’s injury by commanding her, under threat of divorce, to help prepare the body of his new bride. This was intimate work that required hours to accomplish: All of Fadeela’s hair, except head hair and eyebrows, had to be removed; she was bathed, powdered, and perfumed, before intricate designs were painted on her hands and feet with henna dye. The whole time the two women worked together, Hajami maintained an icy silence.

  Drums began to beat when the bride showed herself. She stepped out of the car wearing a simple white dress and flowers woven into the long braid that trailed down her back. Her face was uncovered and her feet were bare. If she was embarrassed about being seen this way, or distraught about marrying Faisal, she didn’t show it. She moved in a businesslike manner past the gawking soldiers, grinning princes, and admiring foreigners. As she passed a gray Mercedes sedan, she paused long enough to tap her fingertips against the tinted glass of the rear window. A pair of manacled hands pressed against the inside of the pane. They belonged to Khalid. Faisal had promised Fadeela that her brother would be released immediately following the ceremony.

  A few more strides brought her to her father’s car, a blue Rolls-Royce. Mr. Yamani was indignant about being forced to trade his daughter for his son and made no attempt to disguise his newfound disgust with Faisal, a man he had counted among his friends. At the same time, he was choking with fear. Despite constant reassurances that there were no alien survivors, the sight of the destroyer awakened the sense of doom that had nearly driven him insane during the previous days. When Fadeela came within reach, he clutched the sides of her face tenderly and put his forehead against hers, apologizing with tears in his eyes for failing her. Reluctantly, he began to lead her to the place where Faisal and the king were waiting.

  They had only gone a few steps when shouting erupted among the soldiers. A battered truck was climbing onto the bluff and speeding directly toward them. Warning shots failed to slow it down. Just as the soldiers took deadly aim, the driver slammed on the brakes and jumped out. It was Reg. His uniform spattered with blood, he came running toward the entourage, shouting like a wild man. Miriyam was right behind him. They’d dropped Guillaume at the Saudi army’s headquarters tent on their way past. The pilots who recognized them ran forward to hear their news. Reg shouldered his way past the men, screaming at everyone to run for their lives.

  “You’ve got to get out of here! Turn around and go!” In his fury to make them understand, he manhandled a prince or two, physically pushing them toward their vehicles. “Where's the king? Let me talk to the king!”

  Instead of the king, he was confronted by half a dozen muscular Saudis, who blocked his path. Reg knocked two of them over and kept going. But a moment later he was tackled from behind and subdued by many pairs of hands. With both arms twisted to the breaking point behind his back, Reg was led through the murmuring crowd and then roughly thrown facefirst to the ground.

  “Major Cummins, I’ve been expecting you.” Faisal was grinning down at him, as unruffled and smugly confident as ever.

  “Listen to me,” Reg snarled, his heart still pounding, “I’ve been inside the ship. They’re alive, many of them, hundreds, maybe thousands. They’re going to attack.” He pointed toward the breach. “They’re going to ambush us.”

  Faisal wasn’t buying it. He figured Reg had ulterior motives for disrupting the marriage. “They must be very friendly, these aliens of yours. How nice of them to explain all their terrible plans to you.” His easy smile changed to an expression of disgust, and he ordered his men to take Reg away. Before they could, the king intervened.

  “Major, what happened to you?” he asked.

  Faisal yelled. “It is a trick. He only wants to interrupt our celebration.”

  “Silence! Let him answer.”

  Reg shook free of the guards and began telling his story. The bloodstains on his uniform were still moist, and there was a wild urgency in his voice. It didn’t take long for him to convince the king he was telling the truth. Before he had told everything, the king had ordered his assistants to begin turning the caravan around.

  “One more thing, Your Majesty,” Reg said. “They know you are here. When they attack, they’ll look for you first.”

  Faisal snorted at Reg’s melodramatics. “He’s making this up! How can he possibly know these things?”

  But King Ibrahim was already on the move. He hurried back to his limousine, got in, and screamed at the driver to take him away at once. Faisal walked over to Reg and leaned in, menacingly close. “You’re a dead man, Major,”

  “And you’re a lying coward, Commander.”

  Shots rang out in the distance. Screams spread through the entourage as everyone turned to face the destroyer. The first alien had come out of the ship.

  The lumbering, top-heavy beast pushed through a narrow opening near the triangular breach, moved a few strides out into the sand, and stopped. Ignoring the machine-gun fire, it made a 360-degree scan of the area. The flaring shell of its upper body rose to a pointed tip, and its heavily muscled arms reached almost to the ground. The bullets nicked away pieces of the exoskeleton until the shell cracked and caved in. A moment later, the whole wretched mass toppled over facefirst.

  Soldiers and civilians stopped in place and looked on in stunned silence. As the king’s limousine sped away, they watched foot soldiers move toward the fallen alien, guns at the ready.

  While they were examining it, a seco
nd creature emerged. This one never hesitated. It hit the ground running and sprinted across the sand. Hugging the curve of the ship, its path took it directly in front of the royal entourage. It moved awkwardly across the sand and rocks, having evolved in some very different environment. The feet were hooked forward in such a way that the creature moved along standing atop its toe knuckles. The effect was something like a circus bear mincing forward on its hind legs. Still, the beast scurried along at surprising speed, twice as fast as a man.

  A cheer went up when the machine-gun fire snapped the creature in half. Its waist was nothing but an exposed spinal column. When it broke, the torso went flying in one direction while the legs went in another. But the thing didn’t die. The alien riding inside this suit of armor commanded the arms and tentacles to dig. Within seconds, it built itself a shallow foxhole.

  New aliens began appearing every few seconds. Some ran zigzag patterns through the open desert until they were gunned down and killed, but most of them sprinted between the entourage and the massive outer wall of the destroyer, like ducks in a shooting gallery, trying to reach the foxhole. Almost none of them made it. The soldiers at the edge of the bluff began firing larger weapons, and the crowd cheered each time one of the skeletal bodies exploded. Some of the limousines began leaving. Many more were pinned in by parked cars and couldn’t move. Drivers leaned on their horns, adding to the noise of the gunfire.

  As the alien death toll climbed, the sense of panic abated. They had seemed invincible in the air but appeared helpless on the ground. It looked like the tables had turned. Some people climbed atop their vehicles to watch as others wandered closer to the action. Everyone wanted to see the monsters pay for the atrocities they had committed against humanity.

  Faisal smelled another opportunity. Although he was an Air

  Force officer, he used his status as the man who had saved the Arab world to seize control of the ground army. He called forward a division of tanks and ordered his soldiers to follow them to the front of the conflict. He would join them as soon as he could find a camera crew. They moved off, leaving Reg to his own devices.

  He retreated through the tangle of parked cars and found Mrs. Roeder. She was standing on the hood of limousine, talking into her headset radio. Reg jumped up onto the car and urged her to help evacuate the area. The American woman blinked at him in confusion. “Major, I admit you were right about there being survivors, but look around. This thing is shaping up into a good old-fashioned turkey shoot.”

  Indeed, the aliens were being killed almost as soon as they showed themselves. Most of them, at least. The handful that survived the sprint past the entourage joined their legless companion in the foxhole. It was now a long deep trench, and growing by the moment.

  Not far from where Reg was standing, Tye checked his watch, then announced dryly, “I’d say it’s time to run like hell.”

  Remi couldn’t have agreed more. “But our driver is stuck. We need transportation.” Like the other pilots, he trusted Reg and Miriyam’s assessment of the danger. He called a huddle with some of the other pilots and quickly formed a plan. They would escape in the old truck Reg had commandeered earlier. Miriyam had thought to take the keys. Yossi slipped in behind the wheel and turned over the engine. Edward and Sutton were next to him in the cab.

  “What are you waiting for? Let’s go.”

  “What about Cummins?” Yossi asked. “We can’t leave him.” Sutton wasn’t sure Reg was worth the trouble, but volunteered to go get him. He dashed off, leaving Edward and Yossi, Palestinian and Israeli, together in the cab of the truck. There was an uncomfortable, dangerous silence between them. Looking for an excuse to step outside, Edward studied the mayhem surrounding them and noticed a nearby truck with dozens of rifles lying in the back. He hurried over and grabbed an armful of them along with several boxes of ammunition. He jogged back to the truck and was loading them into the cab when a face appeared at the driver’s side window. It was the burly Saudi captain from the camp. He grinned at Yossi and popped open a switchblade.

  “Get lost, you talking donkey," Edward said in Arabic. “This is our truck now.”

  “Shut your mouth, filthy Palestinian dog, or I’ll cut your Jewish boyfriend’s throat.” Pleased with himself for foiling the Zionist plot, the muscular captain opened the door and prepared to pull Yossi outside. Before he could do so, he felt the barrel of a gun pressing against the small of his back. A quick hand reached around and lifted his pistol from its holster.

  “Drop the knife,” came a voice from behind him. It was Miriyam. “If you cooperate, you live. If you make a noise, you die.”

  The Saudi knew she meant business. What was more, she’d probably get away with it. The sea of noise surrounding them would easily mask the sound of a bullet. His options, it seemed, were limited. Miriyam hustled him to the back of the truck, which was covered by a canvas roof, and made him climb inside. She told him to lie on his stomach, then sat on his back with her pistol pressed to his skull. The truck ground into low gear and started to move.

  A few yards away, Sutton spotted Reg. “Cummins, let’s get out of here,” he yelled. “A group of us are taking that truck of yours and leaving.” Reg hesitated. Mrs. Roeder was picking up the first reports of trouble coming from inside the ship, and Reg wanted to know what was happening. Sutton didn’t wait. As soon as he’d delivered the message, he turned and left.

  Saudi jets were gathering in the sky, and a pair of helicopters thwacked at the air overhead, moving toward the alien foxhole to finish off the survivors. Through the mayhem, Reg spotted Fadeela. Her father had spirited her away from the shooting and was shouting instructions to the driver of the car in which Khalid was being held prisoner. When she glanced in his direction, Reg waved his arms in the air and caught her attention. Their eyes met for a moment before Mr. Yamani dragged her by the wrist toward his own blue Rolls-Royce limousine. They piled inside and took off across the open desert at the head of a four-car caravan. It took Reg a while to realize that Sutton had gone. He was already climbing into the rear of the truck, which was turning around, preparing to leave.

  The next ten seconds changed everything. Pulses of white light, energy bursts like the ones they’d faced during the dogfights, flew out of the triangular breach and struck the helicopters, destroying them instantly. Until that moment, the aliens had shown no signs of being armed. More pulse blasts sailed upward and began picking off the Saudi jets high above. Others whizzed toward the tents and the tangle of cars parked on the plateau. A limousine not far from Reg took one of the sizzling, fist-sized projectiles. The front end was turned into shrapnel and the entire vehicle tossed sideways. A separate flurry of shots came from the foxhole. Screaming and panic erupted on the plateau as the entourage was caught in the cross fire.

  And their troubles were only beginning. Seconds after the shooting began, the alien ground army started pouring out of the destroyer. Hundreds of aliens, clad in their eight-foot-tall exoskeleton suits of armor, raced down the ramp of debris, firing as they came. Marching out behind them were scores of strange -looking chariots. These vehicles looked like oversize dark brown toboggans that had sprouted short sticklike legs. Each chariot carried a pair of aliens sitting side by side. The chariots looked too flimsy to handle the weight of their bulky passengers, but they raced down the sloping ramp with ease and, when they reached the desert floor, fanned out in several directions to surround the humans. It was the same type of blitzkrieg strategy their attacker planes had used the day before. Within seconds, the chariots had outpaced the alien foot soldiers. While some of the chariots trotted onto the plateau, others raced around the perimeter and began chasing down the cars that were trying to escape.

  Reg turned and broke into a dead run, trying to catch up to his friends in the battered truck. Everything was chaos around him. Cars and people were smashing into one another, desperate to get away in time. The truck was just gathering speed when Reg raced up alongside it. Edward threw open his door an
d helped Reg pull himself inside.

  With bullets and enemy pulse blasts flying through the air, Yossi stomped on the accelerator pedal and flew down a steep embankment, nearly rolling the truck. “Which way? Which way do I go?”

  “That way,” Reg said without hesitation, pointing east. In the distance, he could see the line of cars carrying the Yamani family. One of the alien chariots was following them. Unaware that they were being pursued, the Yamani caravan was bumping along slowly through a shallow valley. Yossi floored it and made up some ground, but they were still far behind when the aliens fired their first shot.

  The car at the rear of the caravan exploded and flipped in the air. Once the other limousine drivers realized the danger behind them, they gunned their engines and tried to get away. They stayed together and raced along the bottom of a wide, shallow wadi. In his haste, the lead driver failed to notice the walls of the gully slowly closing in around him. Instead of steering toward the open, high ground, he drove into a shallow canyon, following its twists and turns. The wadi walls were only four feet tall in some places, but they were too steep for the limousines to climb. The many-legged chariot chased after them, closing in.

  Reg and Edward told Yossi to follow the cars into the wadi, but he swerved away and climbed a small embankment instead. It turned out to be the right decision. Keeping to higher ground, he raced along the top edge of the wadi, catching occasional glimpses of the aliens ahead. The difference in terrain allowed them to close the gap until they came within firing range.

  Edward passed the rifles he’d taken to the soldiers riding in back. Miriyam had let the Saudi captain up, but she continued to keep an eye on him.

  “What about him?” Remi shouted to her. “Give him a gun?”

  The Israeli woman and the Saudi man stared one another down. It was a long, steely stare, during which neither of them blinked. Remi watched them until he began to laugh. “You guys are too lough! You’re scaring me.”