“There they are!” Tye shouted. “We made it.”
Standing in the middle of the road ahead of them were a handful of Saudi soldiers manning a roadblock. To the left, Reg recognized the field that had been occupied by Faisal’s army only hours before. It was empty. On the cliffs to the right were some jeeps with turret guns, but no heavy artillery.
“That stinking bastard!” Reg shouted. He assumed Faisal had double-crossed him, that he’d evacuated the canyon and left him to die as a twisted form of revenge. But when the soldiers came forward, they explained what had happened.
“The aliens left their ship and marched against At-Ta‘if. The king ordered our commander to defend the city.” They claimed not to know anything about Reg or biological weapons or a raid on the ship. Faisal was so sure that Reg, Fadeela, and the others would be killed, he hadn’t even bothered to tell his men about it. “Where are your vehicles?” Ali asked.
The man said they’d been left with two jeeps, both of which were up on the cliffs keeping a lookout. When Ali had explained about the biological weapons they were carrying and that the alien army was chasing them, the leader got on his radio and called the jeeps down. Ali held a brief strategy session with the soldiers while the jeeps came bumping down the dirt trail along the face of the cliffs above them. When they’d agreed on a plan of action, Ali found Reg.
“There is a road that follows the crest of the mountains,” he explained, pointing uphill. “It is about one mile from here. They
have two jeeps. One will carry the weapons down to Dawqah. I will take the other jeep and lead them along the mountains. I will need the thing Tye took from the ship. They will follow it.” “Good idea,” Reg said, “but I’m the one who should lead them into the hills. You know the area. You’ve got to—”
Before he could finish his sentence, a streak of light ripped across the sky and smashed into one of the jeeps moving along the trail, demolishing it. It rolled off the trail and tumbled down the hillside, breaking apart on road. The soldiers in the other jeep stopped and took cover behind their vehicle. A moment later, they suffered the same fate. A pulse blast tore into the side of the vehicle and flipped it over. A few hundred yards downhill, a pair of aliens had climbed one of the cliffs with their chariot and were firing into the clearing.
Edward and Reg raced back to the truck. Reg climbed in the back, grabbed the silver box, and tossed it out to Edward, whose heart almost stopped beating when he saw the deadly microbes flying through the air. He caught it as gently as he could, then took off running uphill. Reg strapped on a flamethrower and came around to the passenger door. The translucent amber creature was lying on the front seat. Reg unfastened a couple of shirt buttons, pressed the organism to his stomach, then buttoned back up. A few seconds after he left the truck, it was destroyed when one of the alien projectiles smashed into it. Edward was already a hundred yards closer to the crest of the hill, running as fast as he could and not turning back.
“Ali,” Reg yelled, “you follow Edward; make sure he gets away.” He patted the lump under his shirt. “I’ 11 lead them up onto those rocks to buy you some time.”
Ali nodded and started to run. Reg crossed the road and headed across the field that had been Faisal’s headquarters. Above the far end of it was a steep outcropping of rocky hills. It would be difficult for the aliens to follow there. The Saudis on the hilltops began firing into the canyon. They were answered by flurries of pulse blasts. Halfway across the field, Reg heard someone calling his name. He looked back at the road. Fadeela was
waving good-bye, half a step ahead of Ali, who was urging her forward. Reg gave her a farewell smile and a crisp salute before continuing on his way.
The rocky ground was treacherous and steep. Reg ran blindly, letting the topography dictate the path he took. Weaving around boulders and leaping over ditches, he ran until he found himself hemmed in by sheer walls of crumbling rock. He tried to climb, but with one hand holding the flamethrower, he could only make it halfway up the wall. He turned to check behind him and saw an alien chariot coming over the rocks in the distance. He slid his arms out of the harness and tossed the flamethrower, canisters and all, onto the shelf of rock above him. Even with both hands free, it was a difficult to reach the top. The rocks crumbled to gravel when he tried to pull himself up. When he finally squirmed over the side, he found himself stranded on an isolated stone shelf, a flat rock fifty feet across. If he was going to continue moving, Reg had only two choices: Go back the way he’d come, or scale another crumbling rock face.
He glanced around the shelf and judged it as good a place as any to die. He still had two canisters of fuel for the flamethrower, enough to buy Edward a few more minutes of time. He pulled the brain-shaped amber lump out of his shirt and set it in the sun, then retreated behind a boulder to wait. He could hear the aliens moving closer, stumbling over the rocks in their cumbersome biomechanical suits of armor. It sounded like there w'ere hundreds of them. The waiting seemed eternal. He fought back the urge to spring out into the open and blast a few of them with fire, knowing that every second he could stall them increased the chances of Fadeela and the others being able to escape. He imagined they must already be past the summit and starting down the other side of the mountain. As he pictured them running, he suddenly realized he couldn’t let the aliens take him alive. If so, they would learn where the biological weapons were. He checked his pistol and found he had two bullets left, which was one more than he needed.
The aliens arrived and surrounded the shelf. Reg listened to their tentacles scraping at the rock walls as they tried to climb. Then the first one lifted its enormous shell head over the lip of the rock. Reg swung his flamethrower around, waiting for it to show itself fully before he fired.
Machine-gun fire came from the cliffs above. The bullets chipped away at the alien’s exoskeletal armor and knocked it back over the side. Reg looked up and saw a white barrier fence, the type that lines the curves of mountain roads to keep careless motorists from driving off the sides. He could see people shouting and running. They looked like civilians. One of them stood at the edge, a man who took off his keffiyeh and waved it through the air as he shouted down the hill. Reg signaled for the guy to stop making a target of himself before he was picked off by a pulse weapon. Before he could make the man understand, a dozen blasts of light flew up the canyon and exploded where the man had been standing. When the dust began to clear, the man was gone, and Reg thought he must be dead. A moment later, however, he was standing there waving and shouting again. He was shouting in English and seemed to know Reg’s name. More pulse blasts ripped into the cliffs on which he stood. At the same time, two of the aliens came over the edge of Reg’s shelf and started toward the amber homing device.
“Over here, boys.” The shell heads swiveled on their thin waists to face Reg. who blasted them with a burst of his flamethrower. The burning skeletons staggered off the edge of the shelf and fell onto the rocks. That left Reg with one canister of fuel. He decided he would let them get to the organism next time and give them a chance to pick it up before he toasted them.
Once again, the man on the cliffs was yelling down to Reg. Who is this fool? Reg wondered. And then he recognized the voice. It was Thomson!
Reg darted into the open, picked up the organism, then returned to the edge of the stone shelf and looked over the side. Dozens of aliens were massed just below him. They were climbing over one another to reach the top. They looked up at Reg, who held the organism out in front of him.
“Looking for this?” he asked before spraying them with the final burst of his flamethrower. As they writhed, he looked up and saw that there were several hundred aliens swarming toward him through the canyon. Arms lifted toward him from every direction, but none of them fired. Either they’d been trained not to risk damage to the brainlike creature, or it disabled their weapons, Reg couldn’t tell which. He ran to the base of the next cliff, stuffed the organism back into his shirt, and began climbing. Befo
re he’d gone very far, there were aliens climbing after him. They would have caught him easily except for the bullets coming from above. Each time one of them got close to Reg, it was knocked off the rock by a hail of small-arms fire.
Arab voices cheered him on from the road above, urging him to keep climbing. A strong hand reached over the last ledge and pulled Reg up to safety. It belonged to a wrinkled, elderly woman who looked old enough to be Reg’s grandmother. But she was large and strong, and it hurt when she slapped Reg on the back to welcome him. He rolled away from the edge and surveyed the situation. The defenders of the clifftop were a motley group indeed. Half of them were women and many of them were elderly. By the way they were dressed, he recognized them as Yemenis. The women wore a distinctive, beaked sort of veil, and the men all had broad daggers, djambiyas, tucked into their belts. Crouching behind their barricades, they looked more like a crowd rioting for better retirement benefits than an army capable of repulsing the brunt of the alien attack. Thomson ran forward in a crouch.
“I’m beginning to wonder about you, Cummins. You pissed off everyone out in the desert, and now you’ve done something to make the aliens mad. They seem to be following you.”
Reg was incredulous. “What are you doing here?”
The colonel rolled his eyes. “I could write a book. Come on, follow me.” He led the w ay to the opposite side of the road, where they would be out of the line of fire. Parked along the shoulder was the Yemeni caravan's transportation: horses, camels, bicycles, motorcycles, and a few passenger cars.
Thomson explained that after the city destroyer was shot down, some rough-looking customers showed up in the desert asking about Reg. He’d hidden himself in the dunes until they flew away, then accepted a ride in a helicopter to Khamis Moushayt. From there, he’d gone to the town of Abha in Yemen, where he’d enlisted in this civilian army that was coming to join the war in the desert.
“We’ve been traveling since yesterday noon, and just when we got to our turnoff road, I recognized that Ethiopian chap from the camp. He told me you’d gone this way.”
As Thomson spoke, Reg looked down the other side of the mountain. As he’d seen many times from the air, one side was a collection of desolate stone canyons leading down to the inhospitable desert, while the other was moist, green, and overgrown with trees. The verdant western slope was steep. It plunged dramatically down to a narrow coastal plane. Beyond that was the Red Sea. The smokestacks of the oil refinery at Dawqah glinted back at him in the sun, as if trying to catch his attention. Reg remembered what Mr, Yamani had said about Dawqah being a “nasty little town.” But from where he stood, it sparkled like the promised land. He interrupted what the colonel was saying.
“Thomson, I need a car. I have to get to the coast.” He lifted the amber-colored organism out of his shirt and showed it to him. “They’re chasing me because of this.”
“Oh, Lord,” Thomson said, recoiling from the pulsating mass. “What is it?”
“No time to explain. But they can sense where it is. I want to lead them down the coast. If I stay here, all these people will be slaughtered.”
“Come with me.”
They jogged down the road until Thomson found someone he recognized, a young man in tight slacks and a silk dress shirt. He looked like he was dressed for an evening of disco dancing except for the djambiya tucked into his wide leather belt. Whipping out his trusty phrase book, Thomson said a few words to him in pidgin Arabic.
“Mish mumkin,” the man said. Impossible. His car keys made a visible lump in the tight fabric of his pants pocket.
“Show him,” Thomson said. Reg obliged. When the man saw the brainlike blob he took out his keys without another word and tossed them to Reg. Thomson led him to a battered Ford sedan. Reg jumped in and started the engine.
“You coming?” he asked Thomson.
“I’ll take my chances here.”
“Get these people out of the way if you can. They’re not going to make much difference.”
“Good luck.”
“See you around.” Reg had shifted into drive and put his foot on the gas, when Thomson remembered something and called to him.
“I almost forgot. Here’s that tape recording you wanted.” From his breast pocket, he pulled out a cassette tape and handed it through the window. “I wouldn’t play it in front of Faisal if I were you. He comes off smelling pretty rotten.”
“You’re a good man, Colonel.”
“Tally-ho and all that rot,” he shot back, as Reg hit the gas and sped away.
When he came to the road leading down to the coast, he saw Remi among the men firing at the advancing aliens. He honked the horn until the big Ethiopian turned around and ran to the car. He jumped in and they took off down the hill, driving slowly and honking their horn. Reg thought the rest of the team might be moving through the trees and wanted to draw their attention. It worked. About two miles from the turnoff, they encountered a beanpole of a man with bright red hair standing in the middle of the road with his legs spread wide and a rifle pointed at them. It was Tye.
When Reg rolled to a stop, the others came running out of the trees and crammed themselves and their weapons into the two-door sedan. Edward was the last one standing outside.
“Too many big people and too many guns,” he said. Reg, Ali, and Tye were already crowded into the front seat, with Ali’s field gun stretching from one door to the other. Edward handed the silver case delicately to a pair of hands in the backseat before climbing inside to join Fadeela, Remi, and Yossi. Before the doors were closed, Reg put his foot through the floor and sent them hurtling down the road.
“Where are we going?” Ali asked, then quickly changed his mind. “Don’t tell me. I probably don’t want to know.” After a couple of miles, the team convinced Reg to slow down. They had a large start on the aliens, and as long as they kept the pace above fifty miles per hour, the chariots couldn’t gain on them.
As the others watched out the rear window for signs of danger, Fadeela was developing another plan. “When we reach the coastal road, there is an airport a few miles north of Dawqah. We can take a plane from there to Jeddah, where someone will know how to dispose of these horrible weapons.
Reg kept his eyes on the road and said that was a good idea. When they came out of the trees and saw the coast road in front of them, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. They were almost home free. They turned north onto the highway and increased their speed. There was traffic on the highway, but not much. Many of the cars they passed were loaded down with families and as many personal possessions as they could carry. The faces behind the windows looked tired and frightened. Hardly anyone gave Reg or the overcrowded Ford a second glance. For a few moments, it felt almost like an ordinary day. The other drivers were observing the speed limit and the rules of the road. Some of them flashed dirty looks at Reg as he sped past them, not suspecting the car with the Yemeni license plates contained enough weapons-grade poison to kill everyone in the Middle East. Even though it was still a few miles ahead of them, Reg could smell the gaseous stench of the refinery.
“I don’t believe it,” Yossi said from the backseat.
“What’s that?” Tye asked.
“They’re coming through the trees. All of them.” They all turned to see what he was talking about and could hardly believe their eyes. It looked like an avalanche moving diagonally down the mountainside, shaking the trees as it came. The alien army had left the winding road to take a more efficient angle of pursuit.
They crashed down the slope at a phenomenal rate of speed, weaving around some trees, knocking the others to the ground.
A blaring horn brought Reg’s attention back to his driving. He swerved back into his lane a second before colliding head-on with a semi. Ali had already figured out what Reg had in mind and pointed him toward the exit he wanted. Then he turned around and told the others what he thought the crazed Englishman behind the wheel had in mind. When he was finished Reg looked at him, impres
sed.
“I thought the only mind readers around here were the ones from outer space.”
They sped toward the front gates of the refinery and the guards who stepped out of their kiosk to question them. The car crashed through a fence and charged into the facility. They followed the road between a pair of gigantic storage tanks, then past the separating station with its open construction and vertical spires rising like stainless-steel minarets. Soon they came to a round, heavily fortified building that looked like it must be the refinery’s control room. When the Ford skidded to a halt, a half dozen men who had been standing around drinking coffee and talking scattered in all directions, thinking they were under attack by terrorists.
Ali caught one of them and dragged him back to the car, explaining, as politely as he could under the circumstances, that they needed access to the refinery’s computer system. When the man asked why, Ali told him.
“We need to spill all the oil on the ground and set the place on fire.”
“Are you crazy?”
“That has nothing to do with it! Show us the computers!”
The man scoffed and refused to cooperate. The team did what they could to convince him. Fadeela told him that several hundred, perhaps thousands, of aliens would be arriving at the refinery within the next few minutes, and Reg showed him the amber-colored organism. Still the man refused. But he changed his mind when Yossi shot him in the forearm, then pushed the man’s nose flat with the hot end of his pistol.
“I’ll count to three,” said the Israeli. “One, two—”
“Don’t shoot!” shouted the injured man. “I will take you inside!”
Stephen Molstad - [ID4- Independence Day 03] Page 32
