Instead of an Arabic voice answering, he heard whistling. He recognized the theme from Bridge over the River Kwai. The Scimitar of the Arabs had no doubts that these were American pigs whistling. Bridge over the River Kwai was on the Iraiti forbidden-films list.
Woodenly he dropped the phone.
"There is worse news, Precious Leader," the guardsman said stiffly. "The U.S. government has declared that you are a war criminal. They say they intend to hang you until dead."
"I will not hang!" roared Maddas Hinsein. "I am the Scimitar of the Arabs. There is not a man alive who can make me hang if I do not wish to. Is that not so, my loyal ones?"
"Absolutely, Precious Leader," chorused the surviving members of the Revolting Command Council, save the vice-president and the information minister, who, not understanding Arabic, settled for staring wide-eyed into space and keeping their legs together so their bladders did not empty themselves.
"They say the Pigs of Peace, as the propaganda broadcasts call them, will cross into Irait if war criminals are not turned over to them. They are very angry over the gas attack on their computer outpost."
"Then they shall have war criminals," Maddas Hinsein announced resolutely. He gazed about the room. "Who will volunteer to surrender themselves? Those who do will go down in Iraiti history. The others will remain with me. Come, come. I know it is a difficult choice, but you are brave men."
A lot of fast thinking went on in the collective brains of the Revolting Command Council. Either option was grave. Neither was desirable. A few considered the American option, but the fear that this was a trick question, a test of loyalty, stayed them.
The minister of agriculture had the presence of mind to translate the option into English for the vice-president and the information minister.
Jackman and Cooder took only a second to decide.
"I'll do it!" said the former.
"No, I will," said the latter. "I'll gladly turn myself over to the Americans."
Their words did not have to be translated into Arabic for the benefit of Maddas Hinsein. Their eagerness to sacrifice themselves for him was plain on their infidel faces. This brought a tear to his eyes.
He came to his feet and gathered up both men in a bear hug. He kissed them on each cheek. Twice.
"You will never be forgotten," said the Scimitar of the Arabs. "Go, now. A plane will be waiting for you."
On the way out of the palace, Don Cooder said, "I can't believe the big lummox fell for it."
"Amen, brother."
As they stood outside the palace trying to hail a cab, Reverend Jackman raised a possibility that had not occurred to them before. "You don't think the U.S. will actually hang us for war criminals, do you?"
The anchor and the reverend exchanged sagging expressions.
They dashed back to the iron entrance gate, banging and shouting and begging for their old jobs back. This was reported to the president, who was forced to brush a tear from his face at the news. "Do not let them in," he added.
Then he turned to his council, saying, "I have this moment decided that I will not allow Iraiti honor to be sullied by this insult. If I cannot possess Kuran, no one may. Defense Minister-"
Maddas Hinsein looked around the table. The late defense minister's left foot had caught on the table edge. That was all of him that could be seen from a sitting position.
"Who would like to be the new defense minister?"
No one raised a hand, so Maddas Hinsein casually waved a hand in the direction of the health minister.
"You."
"I accept, O Precious Leader," said the new defense minister unhappily.
"Go forth and launch all our Scuds."
"The target, Precious Leader?"
Maddas leaned forward. His smile was sick.
"Jerusalem," he said.
An audible gasp filled the room.
"But, Precious Leader, Jerusalem is sacred."
"To the Jews. And the Christians."
"And to us. The Dome of the Rock is there. If we gas Jerusalem, not only will the infidel and the Jew be down upon us, each of our Arab neighbors will be too. Our allies."
"This is what I wish," said Maddas Hinsein firmly. "If I cannot have my way with the world, then everyone on earth must die. I have decided this. Issue the commands. Shoot any who hesitate."
"But, Precious Leader-"
"When you are done, shoot yourself," Maddas said flatly. "There will be no shirking. The hour of glory has come! Civilization was born in the glory that was Abominadad, and from here we will transform the world into a caldron of blood."
The defense minister hurried from the room.
On the way out, he bumped into Sky Bluel, who wore an unhappy expression on her well-scrubbed face. She pushed past into the council room.
"Excuse me," she said, "but I think this so-called tritium is actually a cheesy grade of uranium. I need better materials if I'm going to whip up a working neutron bomb, know what I mean?"
This was relayed to Maddas Hinsein, who invited the American girl to join him at the conference table.
"You want my advice?" she said. "Boss move."
Sky Bluel obligingly went for the seat indicated by the Iraiti president's careless gesture. It happened to be between the dead defense minister and the deceased foreign minister.
"Oh, gross! Are these guys dead?"
No one answered.
"What killed them, anyway?"
"Our Precious Leader has invited you to sit, so you must sit," said the minister of agriculture.
"I'm not sitting between two dead guys," Sky insisted. "No way. They smell and they're making uncool noises."
And since the Scimitar of the Arabs no longer needed an American nuclear expert because he expected American and Israeli nukes to rain down upon all their heads at any minute, he ordered the noisy American girl to be taken to the lowermost torture chamber to await his pleasure.
As she was dragged off, Sky Bluel hurled back the most vicious insult she could summon up.
"You're no Ho Chi Minh! You're not even a CU Guevara!"
Sky Bluel grew silent as she was escorted to the dungeon area. Her guard happened to speak English and remarked with some relish, "I will put you in with the dead American imperalists."
"If I have to be locked up with imperialists," Sky said, "I guess I'd prefer dead ones. I feel a strong urge to meditate coming on. This whole trip is getting very, very heavy."
The guard paused at a rude door marked by a small window bisected by iron bars. A faint pounding came from the other side.
"What is this?" said the guard, putting his face to the bars.
Instantly a quartet of black arms grabbed his face, his throat, and his epaulets. He screamed, dropping a ring of keys. Sky grabbed this and shrank into a corner as the guard was methodically throttled to death.
When he was still, Sky slipped up to the bars.
"Hello, in there," she hissed. "Are you political prisoners?"
"Yes." The voice was dead. "Open the door."
"Coming right up," said Sky, fumbling for the right key.
She pulled on a thick iron ring and the door creaked open.
To her openmouthed astonishment, out stepped a woman with matted hair and skin the color of coal dust. She was nude. Her red eyes blazed in Sky's direction.
"Far out!" Sky said in a thick voice, not quite registering the lean apparition's four arms. "What did they do to you? I mean, how can I help you, you poor oppressed thing?"
The red eyes bored into her. One hand lifted, curling so that a single finger pointed at her.
"Give me that."
Sky touched her hair. "You mean my headband?"
"Yes. It is my favorite color."
"Sure," said Sky, whipping the yellow ribbon from her hair. As she held it out, she asked, "It won't cover much, you know."
"Just your neck, " said Kali, who fell upon Sky Bluel like an ebony spider clutching a strand of yellow webbing.
As
she was slowly throttled to the cold stone floor, Sky gurgled inarticulately. In that respect, she died as she had lived.
Chapter 38
The command went out.
All over Irait, mobile Scud launchers rumbled out of places of concealment. Crews sent their missiles lifting skyward on their rail launchers like a hundred symbols of Arab sexual prowess. Coordinates were programmed into on-board targeting computers.
More than one devout soldier, recognizing the significance of those coordinates, wept openly and cursed the name of Maddas Hinsein.
At air bases from the Kurani border to the frontier with Turkey, from Syria to the west and Iran to the east, pilots leapt into the Soviet MiG 29's and French-built F-1 Mirage fighters, as ground crews frantically affixed chemical payloads to bomb racks and wing mounts.
The flight that would send the world at last into the Red Abyss of Hell was about to be launched. At the command of one man.
It happened that Yussef Zarzour commanded the first Scud to lift off. The massive coordinated strike was supposed to launch simultaneously, but Zarzour was still flushed with the success of his elimination of the 324th Data Processing Cohort, and could not wait to taste of new glory.
Had he known that his Scud was aimed at Jerusalem, he would have instantly reprogrammed it to demolish the Palace of Sorrows. But he was ignorant of that fateful fact.
Hunkered in the shelter of a rock outcropping, he listened for the roar of the rising missile, setting himself for the seismic blast of superheated air and exhaust gases. His fingers were jammed into his dirty ears.
The long thunder of the Scud's plume never came. Zarzour was counting off the seconds. He kept counting. The number twenty should have signified liftoff. He stopped at fifty-five.
He stuck his head up from the rocks.
The Scud simply stood there pointing to the blue sky. It had not cleared the launch rail. Smoke dribbled from the tail. It was gray and lazy.
As Yussef Zarzour watched, the Scud suddenly came apart in a flower of noise, burning rocket fuel and shrapnel.
A sharp shingle of the latter whisked his head off his neck. His crouched body didn't so much as twitch as the shrapnel executed a textbook surgical strike. It was found months later, still in a crouched position, birds pecking at the raw stump between his inert shoulders.
Other Scuds did lift off throughout Irait. They executed parabolas, loops, and arcs that would have astounded their Soviet builders.
These acrobatics terrified the gaping crew chiefs, some of whom fell victim to their own weapons as the rockets careened and tumbled, wildly out of control, back to ground with explosive results.
Scuds blew up on their rails. Or landed hundreds of kilometers short of their targets. Some never got erect. As the rails toiled skyward, they snapped as if brittle with age. In those cases, crews discovered the heavy steel rail launchers had actually crumbled as if from the elements.
In other instances, after successfully erecting, the rails collapsed due to the vibration of launch. Since the Scud was never designed for horizontal launching, this was particularly disastrous to surrounding crews, buildings, and natural rock formations.
Iraiti pilots fared no better. Mirages, towed from their revetments, suffered acute damage during that simple procedure. Nose cones fell off. Landing gear collapsed. Bomb-laden MiG wings dropped loose at their roots, releasing nerve gases on ground crews.
A few Iraiti Air Force jets did get off the ground. Rudders and elevators came off under the G-force strain of takeoff. Wings were sheared off for no apparent reason. Canopies flew away in flight, forcing pilots to eject where they could.
More than one Iraiti pilot was doomed to ride his precision fighter down into the smoking hole that was to become his grave, cursing Soviet workmanship and Maddas Hinsein by turns.
It was as if the hand of God had interceded to save the world from one megalomaniac's nightmare ambition. For no one could understand how the entire Iraiti Air Force and its rocketry units could misfire simultaneously.
Especially President Maddas Hinsein, who shot dead the first two ministers who informed him to his face of the most crushing defeat in Iraiti history.
When he ran out of ministers to shoot, he promoted his personal driver, a corporal in the Renaissance Guard, to defense minister and had the trembling man drive him to a Scud site south of Abominadad, which had misfired but was still intact.
When the Scud crew saw the white limousine of their Precious Leader coming up the road, they formed a circle and drew their service pistols in unison. At the count of three, they opened fire on the center of the circle.
The center was empty. Their bloody bodies soon filled it.
President Maddas Hinsein stepped over the bodies with grim unconcern. He strode up to the inert Scud, squinting at it.
There was a long black squiggle running up one side of the Scud. He had to tilt his head to make it out.
It was a name. An unfamiliar name. The script was so large it curled around the tubular rocket's body almost to the point of being unreadable, forcing the Scimitar of the Arabs to walk around the launcher in order to read it in full.
The script read: "NISEEN."
"Who is this Niseen?" roared Maddas Hinsein, shaking his fist.
"I do not know, Precious Leader," replied the new defense minister.
"Then have every man in Irait named Niseen executed at once!"
"At once, Precious Leader," said Defense Minister Niseen Ammash, who threw his ID cards out the window during the drive back to the Palace of Sorrows and swore to himself that he would go by the name of Toukan for the rest of his days.
He figured that would take him through Tuesday.
Chapter 39
The launch plumes dappling the Iraiti landscape were visible from orbit. Central Intelligence Agency analysts counted over a thousand-which puzzled them because it was more than double the number of Scuds known to be in the Iraiti inventory.
It took hours, but they figured out that some of the flashes were not launch plumes but points of impact. All were well within the borders of Irait, another puzzle.
This intelligence was relayed to the Pentagon, which could make no sense of it, to the White House, which took great pleasure in it, and to Praetor Winfield Scott Hornworks, at that moment riding atop a Marine amphibious assault vehicle through liberated Kuran City like a pasha astride a pink elephant.
It was not obviously a Marine land vehicle, since its angular lines were concealed by a pink fiberglass shell in the shape of a fifteen-foot-high sow. It bounced along like a parade float, its squiggly tail whipping up and down.
An upright pig walked up to the sow and doffed its pink piglike gas mask.
"Sir, intelligence reports the Scud and fighter-jet threat to be completely suppressed," said the pig, actually a centurion with the Praetorian Sues, formerly the Presidential Guard.
"He did it, dang his yellow bones!" whooped Praetor Hornworks, waving a silver standard topped by an eagle and emblazoned with the letters CPQA. "That old gook did it! We liberated Kuran without suffering a single casualty. Screw taking the skies. We got total sand superiority! Sues Pacifica rules!"
"Sues Pacifica, sir?"
"The Pigs of Peace, son," Hornworks explained. "Get your snout in a Latin primer sometime. You might learn something useful."
"Does that mean we can climb out of these silly suits, sir? The men are thirsty as hell."
"Whistling up a sandstorm will do that to a centurion," said Hornworks, eyeing the horizon, which seemed to go straight up to Irait without a bump. "Start passing the canteens. It's Miller time."
"Aren't we forbidden to have alcohol, sir? This is a Moslem country, after all."
Praetor Hornworks fixed his centurion with a cold eye. "Son, if any Ay-rab so much as looks at you crossways, you rear up on your hind legs and give him a good loud oink. That'll get up his skirts worse than the sand fleas."
The centurion gave a snappy salute. "Yes, sir!"
>
Praetor Winfield Scott Hornworks returned to searching the northern horizon line. Somewhere up there, the Master of Sinanju roamed. The final phase of Operation Dynamic Eviction was in his hands. Hornworks hoped he had it in him. The old guy had looked as old as Confucius. And twice as tired. Hornworks had never seen a man look so tired. Like he had come to the end of his string, with maybe one last errand to finish before he cashed himself out.
The question was: how was he going to decapitate Maddas and his command structure without a passel of B-52's backing him up?
Chapter 40
The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran was alerted to the impending incursion by the president of neighboring Afghanistan.
"Why are you telling us this?" asked the speaker of the Iranian Parliament suspiciously. The two nations were not known for being on friendly terms.
"So you understand the scourge coming your way is not sent by us," replied the president of Afghanistan. "We have lost enough troops to the scourge."
"Scourge? Are the Russians coming?"
"These are not Russians. The Russians refused to come to our assistance. They were smarter than us, who have thrown away two crack divisions against the scourge."
Since such a high opinion of Russian intelligence was virtually unheard-of in the Islamic world, the speaker of Iran's Parliament took the warning to heart.
"What is it you suggest we do?" he asked carefully.
"Pray to Allah that the scourge is not intent upon gobbling up your nation and only wishes to pass through."
"Gobble?"
"You will know of its approach by the trembling of the ground and the singing," the Afghan president went on. "One will bring fear to your heart and the other tears of joy to your face. The scourge itself, however, will bring ruin to your armies if they dare stand in its path."
"If it is Allah's will that this be done, who are we to challenge the will of Allah?" asked the speaker.
"I trust that was a rhetorical question," returned the Afghan president dryly. "For it would be better that you spit in Allah's eye than contemplate victory over the monster approaching your border."
"Spoken like a godless tool of the Communists," spat the speaker.
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