Miriyam didn’t stay to argue. She pointed a finger at Tye. “You. You stay here with him.” Then she hurried forward, scanning the area with her assault rifle, to join Yossi.
Reg told Fadeela to stay behind and keep an eye on his mates, but she ignored him. Gripping her rifle clumsily, she chased after the others. By the time she and Reg reached the corner, both Israelis were advancing along the wall of one of the greenhouses. They stopped and waved the others forward. When the group assembled, they were near the mined helicopter. Miriyam signaled for silence, then pointed through the smudged glass of the greenhouse at an armored alien standing on the other side, its tentacles waving idly in the air as it kept watch over the building’s entrance. Two of the many-legged chariots stood beside him.
“I’ll take care of this one,” Edward said, prowling forward with the flamethrower. Once he reached the comer of the greenhouse, he would be able to torch the alien in the back. Ali grabbed him by the arm and said not to use the flamethrower, that they couldn’t risk setting fire to the building.
“Why?” Edward asked. “What’s inside the building?”
The muscular Saudi captain declined to say, but obviously had his reasons. He led Edward back around the greenhouse to a safer angle. The alien sentry noticed them too late. Another roaring jet of fire spit from the barrel of the antique weapon, overwhelming the creature and one of the chariots. Within seconds, the exoskeleton toppled over and split open. The goo-slathered creature inside climbed out and tried to run. Remi killed it with a single shot.
“Let’s move.” Miriyam waved the others toward the building, and they darted for the open doors.
The team ran up the steps and hustled inside. Edward and Ali, coming from a different angle, were a few steps behind the others. As they reached the bottom step, gun blasts sounded from inside, and the team came scrambling back through the entrance with an alien warrior right behind them. As they scattered in all directions the skeletal figure lifted its powerful arm and took aim with its bony finger.
Edward, standing only ten feet away, closed his eyes and squeezed down on the handgrip of his flamethrower. When the canister was empty, the huge gray skeleton came crashing out of the fire and tumbled down the stairs. When the sides of the great shell head retracted and the delicately built creature within fell squirming and screeching to the ground, Yossi put a bullet into its head.
“We must go inside,” Ali yelled. “There are ... we cannot let what is inside burn. It is very dangerous.” Edward’s flamethrower had set the building on fire.
“Tell us what is inside,” Miriyam demanded.
The captain hesitated, but finally blurted out the truth. “Biological weapons, chemical weapons. I don’t know. But they are very dangerous, very dangerous. We must not let them escape into the air.”
“Biological weapons?” Miriyam yelled. “Why do you have such filthy things? It is illegal!”
“There is no time to argue,” Ali told her. “We must not let these weapons be captured.”
Afraid of what might happen if he waited a moment longer, Ali rushed up the stairs and plunged through the fire-engulfed entrance room. The others followed him in. Stumbling and groping their way through the flames, they broke though into an adjoining hallway. With Ali and Miriyam in the lead, they began moving through the building, throwing open the first few doors they found. Behind the doors were private offices crowded with bookshelves and tables full of blueprints.
“Let’s go! We’ve got to hurry,” Miriyam yelled. She turned a comer in the hallway without checking first and took a pulse blast in the face. She flew backwards, slamming against the opposite wall. A second later, two aliens came screeching around the corner. The one in front was squeezing off pulse blasts to clear the way while the one behind him carried a silver box in his arms.
Reg opened one of the office doors and pulled Fadeela inside. Those who couldn’t get out of the hallway rolled into the comers. They fired their weapons as the huge creatures trotted past them, but the aliens, seeing the fire ahead, ignored them. Afraid of the fire, the lead alien lowered its shoulder and crashed through one of the office doors. The other one followed him inside, and, a second later, there was a crash of breaking glass. They had escaped through one of the windows.
“They’re getting away,” Edward yelled, chasing into the office after them. When he reached the window frame, he took aim at the fleeing figures and prepared to blast them with liquid fire. Ali rushed in, grabbed the barrel of the flamethrower, and pointed it at the ceiling.
“Don’t do it,” he said in Arabic. “You’ll kill all of us.” In one motion, the creatures threw themselves into their chariot and began to race away. There was no possibility of catching them. “Come,” Ali said, “we have to hurry.” He pulled Edward back into the hallway, and they moved to where Fadeela and Remi were examining Miriyam. The pulse blast had turned her head into a blackened gourd with a few ringlet curls still hanging off the back.
“She’s dead,” Ali said sadly, “but we have to keep moving.” He led the way down the twisting hallway, staying a few steps ahead of the others. They came to a set of glass security doors that required an electronic key. They’d been rammed open just wide enough to allow an eight-foot-tall body with a flaring head shell to slip between them. Ali raced through and into the next room, which was a laboratory full of sophisticated equipment arranged into several workstations. The bright white walls were splattered with blood. Four mangled bodies, men in lab coats, lay sprawled on the floor. Ali stepped over them and went to a steel door that looked like a walk-in safe. He got into position, then gave Yossi the nod to tear the door open. When he did, smoky wisps of chilled air floated out. The door led to another room, a refrigerated laboratory. Overturned tables and broken glass were strewn on the floor. Ali inched (hrough the doorway. Yossi, close on his heels, scanned the frosty interior with the barrel of his assault rifle and halted when he saw something move. Ali stopped short when he felt Yossi’s hand on his back. Without a word, Yossi reached past him and pointed toward the danger. Hiding in the comer, behind a set of rolling shelves, something twitched about three feet above the floor. To Ali it looked like the end of a tentacle. But as he moved closer and leveled his weapon, he saw that it was a human hand.
A man in a white lab coat was cowering in the corner, arms wrapped around his head. He was shaking with fear and with cold. He screamed when he heard the footsteps, and tried to burrow deeper into the comer. When they lifted him to his feet, there were trickles of blood coming from both nostrils, and the whites of his eyes had gone bright red. Ali picked him up and dragged him out of the cold room into the main laboratory.
“Where are the chemicals? We have to get them out of here.”
The man looked at Ali blankly, then turned and stared around him at the bloodstained walls and the bodies on the floor. He didn’t seem to recognize where he was, but his eyes focused when he noticed Edward’s uniform. He snapped out of his daze and smiled weakly at the man with the flamethrower.
“You’re Jordanian? Me too,” he said in Arabic, then immediately burst into tears.
“Where are the weapons?” Ali insisted. “Where are the chemicals?”
The man ignored the question, sinking to his knees and apologizing desperately to Edward in Arabic. Ali reached down and shook him. “The building is on fire,” he shouted. “Where are the chemicals?”
The man continued to whimper as if he were begging for forgiveness. Reg got to his knees so he could talk to the man face-to-face. “It was inside you, wasn’t it? Inside your head, hurting you and demanding to know things. And you told it everything it wanted to know so the pain would go away.” The man’s eyes opened wide in a new kind of terror, but Reg quickly moved to put him at ease. “They did the same thing to me. They’re doing it to a lot of people. There’s no reason to be ashamed. But right now the building is on fire, and you have chemical weapons in here. Where are they?”
“Not chemical,” the man said
softly. “Biological. We culture biological weapons, and they’re gone. They took everything. We were evacuating and had packed everything we didn’t destroy. There is a helicopter waiting outside.”
“So there’s nothing left?”
“Nothing,” the man said. “The alien monsters took everything that was still here.
When Reg was convinced the building was clear of bioweapons, he picked the man up. “Is there another way out of here?”
The scientist was unsteady on his feet but walked under his own power to a side exit and led them outside. He sat down against one of the greenhouses while Ali went back inside to retrieve Miriyam’s body. He carried her out on his shoulder and looked around for the best place to leave her. He decided on the greenhouse and carried her inside. Yossi found a shovel and dug a grave while the others talked to the scientist.
Reg didn’t know much about biological weapons; none of them did. He knew they were meant to take advantage of human susceptibility to disease, that they were universally despised and widely manufactured. He knew that they were unstable weapons, difficult to control once they had been deployed.
“What were you making in there?”
‘Too much.” The scientist sobbed. “I told the Saudis we were producing too much, that it was dangerous.” He looked up at the pilots, hoping for sympathy, but found only stem, impatient expressions. As he realized that they would force him to reveal the lab’s secrets, his tone swung from apologetic to defensive. “I want to say, first of all, that most of our work here does not involve biological warfare.”
“I hear you,” Reg said evenly. “Go on.”
He said that the lab’s research required the production of many infectious cultures including smallpox, encephalitis, cholera, typhoid, and influenza. But the two agents they harvested in the greatest quantities were the bacterium anthrax and ebola, a virus. While insisting that the lab served only “experimental purposes,” the scientist explained how the two agents were mixed to weapons-grade strength and stored inside glass tubes. If released into the environment, the two substances would create a highly lethal one-two punch. Anthrax, he said, strikes quickly, manifests as bloody lesions on the skin, and is lethal in fifty percent of cases. Ebola, the scientist explained, takes slightly longer, but kills ninety percent of the time. Within days, it would bring on high fever and internal hemorrhaging. In the final stages of death, the carrier would thrash about, spilling contaminated blood. The infection had the potential of spreading widely before symptoms could arise.
“And you created these things?” Fadeela asked. The scientist didn’t answer.
Edward spit in the dirt where the man was sitting.
“Can the aliens use them?” Reg asked. “Aren’t they hard to deploy?”
“I’m sorry. They know to use them; I told them several different ways. They forced me to tell them.”
“What’s the most efficient way to use them?” Tye asked. “Assuming, of course, that you’re bent on world domination and want to kill as many humans as you possibly can.”
The man was sure of his answer. “In aerosol form, during the early morning, so they can create droplets and spread along the ground, and best if sprayed from a high elevation over a population center.”
“This stuff the aliens took, how many people could it kill?” The scientist shrugged and said the question was impossible to answer.
“How many?” Fadeela insisted.
“Theoretically, several times the population of Earth. But realistically, only a few million.”
When she heard those words come out of his mouth, Fadeela raised her rifle and almost shot him. “Don’t say only a few million.”
“They were never meant to be used!”
“How did they take the stuff?” Reg asked. “Did they just come in and raid the refrigerators?”
“As I told you, we were preparing to leave,” the scientist said. “We had orders to relocate to the national facility in Riyadh. We had all the toxins packed for transport.”
“Packed how?”
“Padded containers, this big,” he said, miming a one-foot-square box with his hands, “with a handle.”
“How many?”
“Two. The other one went out this morning.”
“So all they took was one container?”
“Yes.”
“Was it silver?” Reg asked, remembering seeing it in the alien’s arms.
The scientist nodded and broke down in tears when they were finished questioning him. They left him sitting there and went inside the greenhouse, where they stood around in silence for a while, looking at the ground where they’d buried Miriyam. Everyone in the room realized how serious the situation had become. Even though a mere fraction of the alien population had survived the downing of their ship, it was beginning to look as if they were still strong enough and smart enough to win the war on the ground. Not only had the aliens carefully researched the Earth’s ability to defend itself before arriving, they were also capable of gathering sensitive information at will. Tye walked outside and studied the workings of the amber medallion until the others were ready to leave. Obviously, they had celebrated their victory prematurely.
11
A Roadside Encounter
The drive back toward the oasis was silent and slow. Despite the urgency of their errand—warning the Saudi Air Force not to bomb the alien ship for fear of dispersing the biological weapons—they traveled along at only thirty miles an hour. The truck’s engine was threatening to mutiny. The needle on the temperature gauge was in the red. The oil light was flashing, and they were low on fuel. But there was another reason for their slow progress. Miriyam’s death had stunned all of them, made them feel that their efforts at resistance were doomed to failure. No one felt the loss more acutely than Ali. The first time he’d met her, they had almost punched each other’s lights out, but since then, he’d learned to admire and rely on her.
It was late afternoon, and the sun was a bright orange ball hanging over the Asir mountains, directly ahead of them. Ali squinted as he drove, doing his best to steer wide of the places where tongues of sand had licked up onto the highway. For miles around, the terrain was a flat wasteland of sand and stony hillocks, with a few patches of withered scrub brush.
Twenty miles from Qal’at Buqum, they spotted a metallic glimmer in the distance. It was coming from the solar panels mounted on the roof of an isolated gas station they’d passed on the way out. The main building was a modern box of glass and steel that looked like it had fallen off the back of a truck headed for a more civilized part of the world. Ali pulled in to the station, planning to stop just long enough to fill the tank and let the engine cool.
The station was open for business and attended by two older Saudi men who sat outside leaning against the wall of the convenience store. They were listening to loud, whining Arabic music and smoking tobacco from a hookah, a water pipe. Neither of the men gave any indication that the extraordinary events of the last three days had changed their lives in any way. When Ali skidded to a halt at the pumps, one of them went inside to tend the store, while the other slipped his shoes on and sauntered over to pump the gas. Fadeela was the first one out of the truck. She asked the attendant whether the station had a phone or a radio. Of course he had a phone, he answered, but it required a satellite uplink and hadn’t been working since the trouble began.
“We have information for the army at Qal’at Buqum,” she said, “an important message.”
The man shrugged and pointed down the road. The only way to contact the army would be to go there in person. He didn’t seem at all surprised to be conversing with a beautiful Saudi woman dressed in combat fatigues. Nor did he bat an eyelash when her traveling companions turned out to be three Brits, an Ethiopian, a Jordanian, an Israeli, and a powerfully built Saudi who was content to stay behind the wheel, looking crumpled and lost in contemplation. As he’d done ten thousand times before, the old man lifted the nozzle out of its cradle and began f
illing the gas tank while the passersby stretched their legs and wandered inside the store.
There wasn’t much of anything on the shelves, and some of what there was looked as if it had been there for years. The pilots picked up everything that looked edible and as much bottled water as they could carry. Sutton was at the counter negotiating the price of dried dates. He picked up the entire display and set it down in front of the shopkeeper.
“How much?”
The man, who spoke not a word of English, calmly picked up a pencil and wrote the price on a slip of paper. When he pushed it across the counter, Sutton realized the Saudis didn’t use Arabic numbers. Realizing he’d need help, he called Edward over, and a price was quickly established.
“We must look pretty strange to you,” Edward said to the old man in his own language. “I bet you don’t get many groups like us.” The man flicked his hand lazily through the air as if batting the question away.
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “If you stay in one spot long enough, eventually you see everything. Believe it or not, the whole world comes down this road, little by little.” He gave the impression that nothing could surprise him, but his world-weary eyes widened slightly when the pilots began pulling huge amounts of cash from their envelopes to pay for their purchases.
Yossi bought two packs of cigarettes and tossed one at Edward before heading outside and walking across the asphalt toward the bathrooms, which were in a separate building, closer to the road. A moment after the convenience store’s door closed behind Yossi, it swung open again. Tye rushed inside, agitated and out of breath.
“Look at this,” he yelled, pushing his way up to the cash register. “I think I’ve found something.” He had one of the amber medallions resting on the palm of his hand and put the other two on the counter.
Stephen Molstad - [ID4- Independence Day 03] Page 22
