by Justin Bell
“They’re not Iranian military,” Ashland said as he approached. “Not sure who they are, some offshoot group or something.”
“They mobilized pretty quick,” Francesco said. “I took down that motorcycle and they were on me like an hour later.”
“Ever since oil got scarce, this area has shifted that way,” Ashland replied. “Different groups forming up their own militias, makeshift security teams. In their mind, they’re just trying to keep their villages safe.”
“And we killed them for it,” Francesco replied, digging at the ground with one boot.
“Not your fault, Private,” Marcus replied. “Extreme circumstances call for quick thinking and decision making. You did that. Now we just need to figure out what to do next.”
Francesco nodded.
“Sergeant Gregory tells us you saw something fall from the sky?” Xavier asked.
Just by reflex, the private let his eyes drift upward where he could see the faint remnants of debris streaking back and forth just above the low cloud cover.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I mean you see that stuff, right? It’s been doing that for days, right? It looked like something just broke away and came down, a silver bullet, almost.”
Ashland and Marcus met eyes. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Marcus asked. “Thor?”
The intel agent looked somewhat uncomfortable and didn’t directly answer.
“Don’t you dare give me that ‘it’s classified’ BS, Ashland. We are out here in the middle of nowhere with all communications down, and the capital of Iran might just be a pile of burning wreckage. Plus we also felt some kind of impact from the south, too. Who knows what’s going on.”
“Fair point,” Ashland replied. “We’re in the same boat, don’t forget. We’ve been cut off from Washington since this all started happening, so we don’t exactly have any brilliant insight either… but it certainly sounds like Thor to me.”
“What’s your gut telling you?” Marcus asked. “Deliberate launch or accident?”
Ashland turned and looked through the opening in the fence, out northwest toward where Tehran used to be. Thickening spirals of smoke still clung to the horizon like wet cotton, trails of dull gray rising up into the sky, tendrils trying to touch the clouds.
“Tough to think it was deliberate,” he replied. “I mean we still think the Iranian satellite launch had something to do with this? Why would they drop a tungsten rod on their own capital city? Makes no sense.”
“Unless the launch wasn’t controlled by the ISA, but some third party,” Marcus said.
Ashland ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head.
“That was something we didn’t want to think about.”
“Even if it was a third party, what could they possibly gain by wrecking half the world? I mean, think about the tsunami in California… could that have been one of these tungsten rods?”
Marcus felt a kick in his stomach as if a horse had reared back and driven its hooves deep into his gut. In his mind he saw his home in Pendleton ravaged by the Pacific Ocean, a torrential river of once clear, green water turned brown and muddy with the refuse and residue of plowing over the city of Oceanside. How had he not connected those dots himself?
“The tsunami?” he said in a small, fragile voice. “You think that might have been a by-product of a rod impact? Of this whole thing?” Of the Iranian satellite launch, he thought, but did not say.
“Seems awfully coincidental, wouldn’t you agree?” replied Ashland.
Marcus did agree. He agreed very much, and the thought brought a warm heat to his face, a simmering anger building in his chest, a focused and hot pain right at his sternum that he wasn’t sure how to handle. All at once he felt the tight grip of guilt for his role in not stopping the satellite launch, the building force of rage at Iran for launching the satellite in the first place, and a distinct feeling of vast hopelessness for not being at all sure how to respond or what to do about the whole thing.
He was here, in the Iranian desert, not half a world away but an entire world away from his family on the west coast who were either dead, in mortal danger, or dealing with the loss of everything. He couldn’t even call them. Sergeant Gregory dropped, stumbling backwards and sitting on the sloped armor of the LAV-25, his hands dropping between his knees and his eyes drifting toward the ground.
“Sergeant?” Ashland asked, narrowing his glare at the man.
“I’m all right,” Marcus replied. “I’ll be all right. I just need a moment.”
He took his moment, sitting there in the scorching desert, lost in his thoughts, trying to work out a plan in his head. Any kind of plan, anything that would take steps toward stopping this crazy rotation that the world had gotten into.
Everyone around him gave him his space, knowing what he was working through, what his family was likely dealing with, and the distinct whirlwind of emotions. There was a handful of seconds of silence under the dull gray sky, the Iran desert as quiet as it was desolate.
Finally, Sergeant Gregory spoke.
“Mount up,” he said quietly. “LAV’s, everyone. We’re Oscar Mike, heading to Tehran. We can’t make any decisions until we get some intel, and we need to have face time with the city—or what’s left of it—before we can decide what our obligations are and what to do next.”
“Seems like a solid first step,” Ashland replied. “Then where do we go from there?”
Marcus pushed himself to his feet. “There’s a clear and present danger, gentlemen,” he said quietly, though loud enough so everyone around him could hear. “We need to get eyes on the situation. Head to Tehran, figure out what happened and use that intelligence to figure out what might happen.”
“Makes sense,” Agent Xavier said.
“With all due respect, Sarge,” Private Bragg interjected. Marcus turned around to look at him. “Once we figure out what happened in Tehran, what do we do from there?”
Marcus looked up at the sky, his eyes focusing on the faint streaks of light arcing in orbit, far beyond any reasonable threat. Yet even watching them, so high up above the Earth, he had this ominous feeling that any one of them at any time could just reach down and bring the wrath of God upon them. No warning. No chance. His heart picked up its already swift rabbit’s foot thumping. He had to move. They had to move.
“We keep moving,” he said. “North and west. Out of Iran and back home. I’ve seen enough desert sand to last me a damn lifetime.”
All around the group, heads nodded agreement, a palpable sense of relief cascading through them, the idea of heading home a sweet and ripe fruit that they could all taste on their tongue.
***
Now.
Monday, June 29th.
In the skies above the Middle East.
“No no no no no,” Bojing whispered, sitting in his plane seat, his knees tucked up tight to his chest, both arms wrapped around them. They’d been in the air for several hours, and for at least the final two, Bojing had been despondent, near hysterical as they had grabbed his brother’s corpse and dragged it down the narrow aisle of the small aircraft, leaving darkened stained streaks on the threadbare carpet behind them.
Whenever he seemed to be getting over it, he’d lean slightly forward, breathe a little harder, then catch sight of the drying blood on the floor and lose his mind again, rocking back and forth, closing his eyes, trying to shut out this world they were now living in.
Chung wasn’t doing much better. Outwardly he wasn’t hysterical, but inwardly he was dreadfully close to losing his mind, not just with the sudden death of his cousin, but with the growing realization that he and his friends had played a role in hacking a satellite that could have very well just kick-started World War III. His mind kept trying to tell him it wasn’t true, but his heart refused to believe it, wrapping its meaty fingers around the guilt and closing them, holding it tight within his chest, invading his lungs so he was having trouble breathing.
It was a physical thing,
the guilt, a pointy and uneven rock clamped within his rib cage, invading all empty space, driving its hard edges into his insides, almost feeling like it was growing larger and could burst free at any moment.
If the guilt did burst free, he wasn’t sure he’d live through it.
“You look like you just spoiled Christmas,” Bahram said as he approached, walking back down the aisle.
Chung glared up at him.
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” Bahram replied. “Everything you’ve done was at our command. I hereby relinquish your guilty feelings, young Mr. Fong. You may return to your daily life.”
“My daily life of what? Being carted around in airplanes against my will?”
Bahram smirked. “Ahhh, you do have some backbone. Not too much backbone, okay? As we showed earlier, you are not all as indispensable as you might think.”
“You’ve made that point perfectly clear.” Chung glanced over at the aisle, his eyes drifting to the streaks of stained carpet along the middle.
“What you haven’t done,” Chung continued, looking back up at him, “is tell us what else you have planned.”
“All in due time, my young friend, all in due—”
The plane leaped to the left, as if a large hand had grabbed it and pulled, yanking it almost horizontal. Bahram stumbled, barely catching himself on the seat backs, his eyes widening and his breath catching in his throat. The turbulence was so bad even Bojing snapped his head from his arms and glanced around.
Small spatters of sound peppered the aircraft from all around, thick clunks and clanks pounding all around, striking the curved, metal surface of the fuselage and the plane’s body. It sounded like a hailstorm, if the hail was large chunks of ragged metal instead of frozen water. Each strike punched the plane, making a large, echoing bang inside the cabin, though not quite loud enough to feel dangerous.
“What’s going on?” asked Tyan-Yu, almost jumping from his seat. Huang-Di reached toward him to coax him to sit back down. Near the front of the plane, the men seated in the section began milling around, obviously concerned.
Bahram gestured toward the Chinese students as he made his way toward the front. “Just be calm,” he said. “Normal turbulence, I’m sure.”
Chung didn’t buy it and as Bahram walked a few rows ahead, he leaned over in his own row and pulled the shade up on the window.
The sight struck him like a fist and he drew back, nearly screaming in alarm. All around the plane, the sky was filled with flaming, falling debris. Metallic shards and thick, armored chunks, solar panels, wire-trailing armor plate and dozens of smaller pieces of unrecognizable shrapnel pummeled the aircraft’s wings and body and as he looked out the window, a small piece struck it and glanced off, leaving a tiny crack in the thick material.
Lurching and seizing, the plane began shaking and starting to tilt to one side as it was peppered with debris slamming down around it from chunks of broken-up objects hitting a descending orbit just enough to break into the atmosphere.
“The plane is going to break apart!” he shouted up to the men near the front of the aircraft, and Bahram glared back at him, though nobody else did. “We need to land!”
“Calm down!” Bahram shouted back. “We are almost to the airport! We will be arriving shortly!”
Chung returned to the window and saw that they had indeed started a gradual descent and were underneath cloud cover. He could make out vast, sandy deserts down below, dirt, rocks, and brush scattered about the wide expanse of barren lands. For a brief moment, he wondered where they were and where they were headed, though he couldn’t think about that too long before more chunks of random broken objects thumped and thwacked against the plane.
“Where are we landing?” Chung screamed. “There’s too much stuff falling, we’ll never make it!”
Near the front of the plane, the other men were gesturing and speaking in low, angry whispers, Bahram making gestures in return, trying to get them to calm down. He broke away and walked back toward Chung, his face twisted and angry, but his steps remaining relatively calm.
“You need to relax, Chung,” he said insistently. “The other men up there, they will not hesitate to kill you and throw you out of the plane. I may be the only one keeping you alive.”
“Why?” Chung asked. “What difference does it make? When the plane goes down we’ll all be dead.”
Bahram glanced around, then stepped closer. “I know you were the key to this whole thing. Without you we never would have gotten access to that satellite. You are smarter than the rest. We need you, but don’t you dare tell my friends I told you that.”
“Fine,” Chung hissed. “You need me. So land the plane or else I’ll be smeared across the desert with the rest of you.”
“We’re not far from Tehran. We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes, that is where we are landing.”
“Iran? We’re actually flying into Iran?”
Bahram nodded. “They will protect us there. Help us set up shop and keep us safe.”
“They are expecting us?”
Bahram shrugged. “They were, last we checked. But we have had no communications for quite some time.” More rattling bangs scattered along the roof of the plane above their head. “As you can see, there isn’t exactly a reliable way to talk to the airport at the moment. Tehran is to our west, we will be approaching—”
His eyes moved to the window, the shade open, and his mouth dropped.
“What?” Chung asked. He turned and glanced out the window as well, following Bahram’s eyes. Across their field of vision the desert continued north to south as they were banking around east. Filling nearly the entire view through their window was a roiling cloud of dark, angry smoke, layers of black and gray feeding on itself, growing larger, thicker and stretching up high into the sky. Below and around the darkened patch of dead earth, Chung could see smashed and broken buildings, the shattered remnants of civilization, a burnt and charred wound on the flesh of the Middle East.
Through the filtering smoke he could see a massive crater that looked to be just northeast of where Tehran had once been, a jagged, wide, circular ditch dug out of hard packed earth, then pummeled down into place. From this vantage point the ditch looked half the size of the city itself, the shockwaves having flattened the majority of Tehran’s buildings, knocking them down like an angry child frustrated with picking up his room. From high in the sky, all around the smoke scorched ground he saw circular, rippling scars, moving outwards from the crater, which looked like some kind of puncture wound magnified a thousand times.
“By Allah,” Bahram whispered, looking out the window.
“Is that… is that Tehran?” Chung asked, his eyes glued to the carnage fifteen thousand feet below them.
“Did… was that… did we…” Bahram seemed legitimately without words. “That’s not what we wanted. The damage. It’s…”
The plane dipped left, then angled right, the metal-on-metal impacts seeming to ease off, though Chung saw some more debris slip past them and hurtle down toward the ground, as if enough damage hadn’t been done already.
“What are we going to do?” he asked, turning toward Bahram, who was pale, his mouth still working soundlessly, his eyes gaping wide in horror. Without a verbal reply, he stood and entered the aisle again, noiselessly walking toward the front, placing his hands on seat backs as he went.
As Bahram spoke to the men up front the plane rose slightly, tipping west, preparing to continue on to another landing spot. The Imam Khomeini International Airport was officially out of service.
***
Now.
Monday, June 29th.
The deserts of Arizona.
The sun hadn’t yet risen when Marilyn awoke, and when she first opened her eyes, for a moment she thought she’d only been sleeping for an hour or two. Her arms were curled up around her, trying to keep herself warm, the air indeed far cooler overnight than it had been during the day. Hard sand and rocks dug into her ribs as she rolled
over, trying to wake her muscles and get her body back to a functional state.
Soft, orange embers continued to burn in the fire pit, and she could make out the hunched figures of two Marines there, who remained huddled by the campfire and near them all, remaining on watch, making sure no one or nothing surprised them.
“You’re awake?” Lieutenant Drake said quietly and started to stand.
Marilyn drew up quietly into a kneeling posture, working to not bother her daughter who seemed to still be fast asleep, even closer to the fire than she was.
“Yeah,” she replied. “I guess so.” She blinked and rubbed at her eyes, then looked at her empty wrist before realizing she didn’t have a watch. “Time is it?” she asked.
Lieutenant Drake did have a watch and she checked it. “Almost five,” she replied. “Early still. Sure you don’t want to grab some more shut eye?”
Marilyn shook her head. “Don’t think I could if I tried.” She looked back up at the dull, dark sky, her eyes following the tracks of moving debris in orbit. “Once I locked eyes with that, suddenly I don’t feel much like lying still in one place for too long.”
Drake nodded. “I get it. Everyone needs their sleep, though. Lord knows we’ll be on the move enough in the coming days, I suspect.”
“Probably true,” Marilyn replied.
As if in answer to their conversation a swift, sudden crack of thunder split the clouds, rolling over the desert sands, feeling almost like a physical force. Marilyn tensed.
“Just thunder,” Drake said.
“For now.”
On the other side of the fire, some of the prone figures stirred, one of them coming up into a seated position.
“Mom?” it said quietly.
“Scotty? Yeah, it’s Mom. I’m awake. You awake?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I’ve been awake for a bit, but trying to keep quiet. That thunder keeps on barking, everyone will be awake soon.”
The sky lit with a strobe blast of lightning. Marilyn braced herself, though it took a handful of seconds for the massive punch of thunder to explode all around them.
