Then a banging on the top of the coffin as someone jimmied a screwdriver or a wedge into the top. She heard someone grunting. Then—crack—the top came off the box and she instantly closed her eyes at the unaccustomed light.
Shouts as a man rudely yanked her to her feet. She was soaked in sweat and reeking of urine. A man she couldn’t see slapped her. Someone else punched her. She fell back into the coffin, her head spinning. She grabbed the oxygen tank.
Her eyesight was gradually returning. A man was coming forward, toward her. She raised the empty tank above her head and brought it down on his skull. She could hear the crack of the bone as he fell.
Someone grabbed her from behind. She brought an elbow back and caught him in the Adam’s apple.
Now half a dozen men were on her, punching her and ripping at her clothes. She clawed and gouged and bit. She could feel flesh rend and hear men scream and curse. She would not go down without a fight, not this close to freedom. Not this close to death.
They were too much for her. When they had finished beating her into submission they stripped her naked and tied both her hands behind her back and hung her on a hook. The pain was excruciating, but she knew she could endure it for a while. She had sworn to herself that she would get Maryam to safety and she would fulfill that promise.
There were about twenty men in the room now, laughing at her. Spitting at her, fondling her, touching her, slapping her. It was as if at least half of them had never seen a naked woman before, had never come this close to a Western woman before. She was at once an object of scorn and lust, of repulsion and desire. She was the West, helpless before the East and yet somehow still potent, still threatening.
One man ventured a little too close and she struck out with her right foot, smashing his nose. He spouted blood and fell to the floor. It was like throwing chum into a shark tank. His mates turned their attention away from her and circled round him, laughing, pointing. One of them lashed out with a foot, in imitation of her, only this foot was shod and the point of the shoe caught the man right under the chin.
His head snapped back, and that was the signal for the others to fall upon him, beating and cursing him, cursing him for the shame of being bested by a woman, by a naked woman, by a Western woman. Even after he stopped moving and crying out, they continued to beat him like a dead ass in the street whose owner has not realized he has just lost a prized possession, and they kept on beating him, pulping him until—
A gunshot. A single gunshot. It was the most welcome sound she had ever heard.
Two men cut her down, wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her into another room. She was inside some sort of government building, spartan and functional, moving from what looked like a squad room and into more private quarters. Yes: now that her vision had cleared, she could see that the men were wearing uniforms—the uniforms of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, better known as the Revolutionary Guards.
A bearded officer approached her and spoke to her harshly in Farsi. She shook her head: I don’t understand. He stepped closer, caught sight of her English blue eyes, and recoiled. She was not the woman he had been expecting.
He turned and barked something to the two other men in the room, who quickly departed. Once the door had closed, he lit a cigarette and took a deep drag.
“My name is Col. Navid Zarin. Welcome to Iran,” he said.
“I suppose that was your special welcoming committee? Is that how modern Persians greet their guests?”
Col. Zarin smiled. Spunky. Breaking this one was going to be fun. “A guest, yes—but under irregular circumstances. May I get you something to drink? I would offer you coffee, but as you know we observant Muslims do not drink coffee, even though we invented it and the Turks brought it to the gates of Vienna with them. Pity. I did enjoy it when I was a student at UC Irvine, back in the day.”
She shook her head, said nothing.
“There is a bathroom through that door,” he said. “Please clean yourself up. When you come out, I will have some clothes here. You will put them on, so as not to tempt my men with your beauty. And then we will have a little talk.”
He came closer to her, cigarette in hand. “We are not supposed to smoke, either, but old habits die hard. After all, we are not Mormons.” He laughed heartily at his own joke.
The cigarette was dangerously close to her face now. She could feel the heat from its glowing tip. She knew that the temperature of the tip of cigarette could reach up to seven hundred degrees Celsius, and leave a mark forever. Closer . . . closer . . .
“You’re sure you wouldn’t like a drag?” he said, with a smile. She closed her eyes, flinching from the burn she knew was coming.
But it never came. Instead, the officer stubbed the cigarette out and pointed toward the bathroom. “In there. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe. None of my men will molest you. You have my word as an officer and an Iranian gentleman. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to make an important telephone call.”
Amanda wrapped the blanket tightly around her and slowly backed away. All her instincts were on alert, but she couldn’t read this man. Would he show traditional Muslim respect toward a helpless woman, or did he consider her a Western whore who could be raped or killed without consequence? She supposed she would find out soon enough.
The hot water was a welcome relief. She could stay in the shower, mean as it was, forever. She found some soap and scrubbed herself, then washed her hair with it. She wasn’t going to look her best, but then that didn’t really matter right at the moment. She was lucky to be out of Maryam’s coffin, and lucky to be alive.
The moment. She would take a page from Skorzeny’s book, since he had always preached the gospel of the present to her. The future might hold terrors or wonders or both, but there was nothing she could do about it for now, except to be as ready for it as she could.
When she emerged from the shower, still clutching the blanket to her, the office was empty. There, on one of the chairs, was a full-length chador, much like the one she had left for Maryam.
She put it on. She felt like she was going to a costume party in Mayfair, but this was no joke. She had just finished dressing when the door opened and the officer walked back in.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Not exactly what we were expecting, but nonetheless beautiful. Now, you will please come with me, there are several people who would very much like to meet you.”
If Maryam thought the Grand Ayatollah’s ringing invocation was the end of it she was mistaken. As one, the crowd turned toward the sacred mosque where the vision of the Prophet now floated over the holy place.
“O Muslims, behold!” shouted the Grand Ayatollah.
“Until today, was not such a thing forbidden? And yet you are witness. For so I proclaim that I am Seyed Khorasani, in fulfillment of the hadith—I, the man from the East, from our blessed Persian tradition, here to unite two great cultures, and bring together all the ummah. O Muslims, this is the beginning of the days you have been awaiting for more than a thousand years. And thus do I proclaim to you that the days of the Occultation are nearing an end, and that the Coming is nearly upon us!”
“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”
“O Muslims, behold!”
In the near distance, behind the mosque, three Shahab-3 rockets leaped into the air, heading north, east, and south.
“Let the infidel be warned—this is only a small demonstration of our might. We no longer fear the West. Therefore, I hereby proclaim that we have no alternative but to unleash Allah’s holy fire upon the Great Satan’s cities and rain down His wrath upon the Zionist entity. The next missiles will go to the West, bearing the most fearsome weapons, and the Faithful will soon be worshipping freely in al-Quds. So it is written, so shall it be done.”
Above the mosque, the image of Mohammed slowly faded from view.
“O Muslims, truly the Coming is upon us! Gird yourselves, for the battle will be hard and bloody. But it is only through blood that we are
purified and made holy. It is only through jihad that we prove ourselves worthy of Imam Ali and Issa. It is only through them that we will truly find Paradise—when all the world has accepted the Word, or is put to the sword. Allahu akbar!”
The crowd burst into a cacophonous roar. Maryam slowly edged away, heading behind the mosque. She needed to get word out. She needed to warn the world.
Any transmission from this spot, though, she knew would be picked up, if it even got out. The mullahs may have practiced a fundamentalist brand of a seventh-century faith, but they were very much up to date on the latest Western technology, and they were not about to let things get out of control.
Think. What would Frank Ross do?
Two members of the religious police saw her moving away from the crowd and made a beeline for her. Unaccompanied women should not be wandering the streets alone, lest they be thought whores.
She was either going to have to talk her way out of this or fight her way out, and at this point she didn’t much care which.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Washington, D.C.
It was just the three of them, sitting in the Oval Office. President Tyler had switched off the recording system, a descendant of the one that Johnson had first instituted and that had brought Nixon low. He’d had Seelye’s CSS men sweep the place for any bugs and then bubble over the White House so that no transmissions would inadvertently leak out.
Even though the old Soviet Union was dead and buried, the old Soviets were back as the new Russians, still with their ambitions for great power status, still bearing their animus against the U.S., still competitive although greatly diminished in size, population, and capacity. The new Russian president was fighting a rearguard action against the forces of fate, but his dream of reconstituting the Czarist empire was still burning.
And now the country had a more worrisome foe than the Russians. The long, slow, three-hundred-thirty-year sleepwalk from Sobieski’s triumph at the gates of Vienna had abruptly ended on 9/11. Or, rather, the age-old conflict between Islam and Judeo-Christianity had begun again anew. Only this time it was, as the Pentagon liked to say, asymmetrical, with the Muslims using the West’s own technology against it and hiding behind the Metternichian fiction of Islamic nation-states while waging war in the name of the ummah and Allah. It was settling in to be a long war of attrition.
“The only question, Mr. President,” Shalika Johnson was saying, “well . . . there are two ‘only’ questions. The first is, if we accept the premise of asymmetrical warfare, then what is an acceptable level of casualties on our side? How many people are we and the Europeans prepared to lose each year—to say nothing of the people in Africa and Southeast Asia—so that we can maintain our high moral ground?” She spat the last three words out like the gang member she once was.
“The second ‘only’ question is this: if you can’t answer the first question, then what are you prepared to do about putting an end to this, as asymmetrically and finally as possible?”
“Well, Shalika,” said Jeb Tyler, “that’s what we’re here to discuss, isn’t it? Army?”
Seelye pushed a button on his PDA and one of the screens across the room flickered on. “This just occurred in Iran,” he said. “This is from their state-run television feed, which was broadcasting a speech by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Ahmed Hussein Mustafa Mohammed Fadlallah al-Sadiq.”
“Quite a mouthful of a moniker he’s got there,” said Tyler.
“Apparently the Ayatollah was giving a speech outside the sacred mosque of Jamkaran—”
“It’s not sacred to me,” said Tyler quietly, cold steel in his voice.
“Yes, sir. As I was saying, he was giving a speech about the Coming—that’s their term for the resurrection of the Mahdi, who is supposed to be down the sacred . . . er, the well, when this happened.”
All eyes were on the screen. There was the image of Mohammed, the same image that had set off the horrible rioting in Africa, which was still raging. As usual, the United Nations had condemned the violence and sent in peacekeepers to Nigeria and elsewhere, but they were quickly routed by people with no need to keep the peace. The death toll was horrendous, and nobody knew what to do about it.
Except Jeb Tyler. “That’s the same image that was seen in Africa, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” replied Seelye.
Tyler got up. A drink would have felt good right about now, but he turned away the temptation. He had to think both rationally and emotionally. He had to cut this Gordian knot, end this cycle of constant conflict and misery and death. If he could do this, then he would be a great president, and it wouldn’t matter if some nobody like Angela Hassett beat him in the election. For the first time in his life, he saw a way clear to serving the people—not just the people of the United States, but the people of the world, even the Muslim world—instead of serving himself, and by God he was going to take it.
“I get it,” he said softly.
“There’s more, Mr. President,” said Seelye. Tyler turned to look at the screen.
“No, I’ve got it.”
A holographic projection of Islam’s prophet.
A trio of Shahab-3 rockets, leaping into the sky.
It was so obvious now.
“All our problems are related,” said Tyler. “All of them. The apparitions, the riots, whatever the hell is hidden at Mount Sinai, the well at Qom, the Iranian nuclear program—all of it is really just One Big It. And that’s what we’re going to solve, right here, right now. Am I clear about this?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” said Shalika Johnson.
“Yes, sir,” said Army Seelye.
“What were you going to say, Army?”
“That those Shahabs were fully nuclear-operational. All they need is the word from the top and we’ve got six million more dead Jews.”
“And a hundred million dead Muslims,” added Shalika. “Israel will not go quietly—and, as you know, sir, we have assured the Israelis that we will retaliate on their behalf as well, which is something the entire Muslim world understands.”
“But the Iranians don’t care,” noted Tyler. “At least, not the bunch running the country. They want the end of the world and they’re bound and determined to do it. But this all stops now. All of it.”
Neither the NSA director nor the secretary of defense had ever seen Tyler like this. They were used to the boyish Louisiana pol, the say-anything president, the man who preferred to be loved rather than respected. And now he was changing right in front of their eyes.
It was about time.
“STUXNET,” said the President.
“It’s been deployed at several Iranian nuclear sites. . . .”
“Is Qom one of them?”
“Up to now, no. Qom—actually Fordo—is just an enrichment site, so we and the Israelis concentrated on—”
“Turn the worm loose on Qom. Right now. I want instant results.”
Seelye punched in the order and transmitted it back to the Building in Fort Meade. He got a pingback almost immediately. “Sir, the Iranians have mounted very effective defenses against the worm, mainly through patches supplied by Siemens in Germany. There’s only one way to introduce the virus at Qom.”
“What’s that?”
“Somebody has to do it manually. Where’s Devlin?”
“Probably in country by now,” said Seelye.
“And his team?”
“In place, Mr. President. On the Eisenhower, at Al Dhafra, on Diego Garcia.”
“Then he’ll have to do it manually. Relay the virus and instructions. I want the whole damn system taken down.”
“Done,” said Seelye.
“That’s what the bastards get for using Windows,” muttered Tyler. “Next.”
Shalika looked at her notes. “We’ve established that the apparitions are really just laser-carried holographic images being relayed from the surface of the moon. As you know, Mr. President, the Apollo astronauts left retro-reflectors on the
moon’s surface for use in scientific experiments, so somebody—”
“Skorzeny,” said Tyler.
“Skorzeny or somebody has hijacked the experiment.”
“Where are the projections originating?”
“The Côte d’Azur.”
“Which means somebody at CERN is involved.” He looked at Seelye. “What did Devlin say about that Algerian scientist he grabbed . . . what’s his name?”
“Farid Belghazi, sir,” said Seelye. “He’s being held in protective custody at an undisclosed—”
“Disclose it.”
“At Mount Olive in West Virginia. Level Five security. He’s not a happy puppy.”
Tyler’s eyes were gleaming now. Sometimes it was good to be president.
“I want him less happy. In fact, I want him fucked up to the maximum level the law allows, and then I want him fucked up just a little bit more, in case his training has prepared him for the maximum level the law allows. And then I want him to sing out Louise. Who do we turn at CERN and how quickly can it be done? I want control of those lasers.”
“He has a brother still working there, I believe,” said Seelye.
“See that he sees the light, pronto.”
Tyler rang for Manuel. The steward appeared in the doorway, ready to take orders. “Three of my favorite libations, please.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Sir, it’s—” began Seelye, but Tyler waved him off. On the screen, the Grand Ayatollah was still ranting and Mohammed was still preaching, in an endless loop....
“Secretary Johnson, belay my request for operational planning involving the bombing of the Iranian nuclear facilities. Skorzeny and the Iranians have just handed us a great gift—and we’re going to use it.”
Tyler rubbed his hands together. This was it—all the marbles. If he could pull this off, not only would he go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents, he would also land in the same history books as the canniest politicians who ever lived. Which was the higher honor, he wasn’t sure.
“We don’t have to do it all. We don’t have to kill everybody. But we don’t have to roll over and play dead, either. They think the End Times are a’comin’—very well then, we’re going to give them their End Times. But not the way they think. These will be the End Times to end the End Times—not only in our lifetime, but—if we get it right—for generations to come.”
Michael Walsh Bundle Page 89
