Critical Mass (34 page)

Her body had grown sick very soon in the plane. The night was big, the city full of confusing lights. She had kept the thing straight, keeping the bubble in the right place on the faintly glowing dashboard. The thing belonged to the devil. It was a machine of the devil.

She had not seen her husband and her brother solemnly taking the money, the stack of euros, after she had flown into the night. She had not known that her children had been abandoned in the cellar where they had been taken, simply left there locked away to die on their own, and their father, who would soon be in Beirut with ten thousand euros, would never think of them again.

The two Arabs were now on a train that was sweeping down the coast to Naples, its windows lighting the dry farmland through which it passed. They sipped coffees.

Her brother and her husband, having been exposed to the naked bomb, were being sick in the dirt of the racecourse, their vomit black in the sand, euros blowing about on an easy little breeze.

Ahead, she saw the great church, the largest thing in the city, although she had for a moment been confused by the Vittorio Emmanuel monument. She knew nothing of any of these places. Her family worked in the fields. She and her husband sometimes made a baby of cardboard and cotton cloth for her to thrust at tourists, so that they would grab at it while her husband and her brother picked their pockets.

The men were not good pickpockets. They seldom succeeded.

The family was crushed together in a shack outside the A90 in Ciampino. Somehow, the Arabs had come into their lives. She did not know how. When the Arabs had taken the children, her husband had rolled on the ground and torn at his hair. How could so many misfortunes befall him? How could this be?

She could not fly this machine long. It swooped, it was buffeted by wind, it roared, and as she became more afraid, the instruments became harder to understand. Where was the bubble? Was she going right, left? Where was the compass?

Lights were rising to the north. She had been warned of this. Air fighters to shoot her down. Her mind fixed on her screaming daughter, on the smoking hair, the frantically bobbing head.

The machine hummed and vibrated. It reeked of petrol, and then something flew past outside—a roof! She had dropped almost to the ground: she pushed the rudder pedals, causing the whole contraption to shudder, and some sort of horn to start blatting in her ears.

There was pain all over her body. To the left, a great red wave that was not racing toward her but was the last electrical effect of an exploding brain.

Absolute fire in the sky. She, a vapor, not even that. Shattered atoms.

Rome was not expecting this at all. There had been no indication that the city was in any way a target. All eyes had been on places such as Washington, New York, and London. The theory was that Muslims would know, or would have strong suspicions, and would leave threatened cities.

They had not left Rome, nor Paris, nor Berlin, but the Muslims of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn and Finsbury Park in London had departed in large numbers, ignoring curfews, ignoring everything—which had, in turn, sparked mass evacuations from both cities.

In truth, these people had no special knowledge, but they also were well aware of the extremists among them, and the fact that America and England were considered the Crusader capitals of the world.

Not even these people, however, knew enough of history to make the obvious prediction, that after the great sin pot of Las Vegas the Crusaders’ religious capital would certainly be the next target.

From Urban II in 1095 through Boniface VIII in 1271, all the popes had called for crusades. This had happened in response to Muslim invasion of various parts of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had, by 1095, been Christian for over seven hundred years, part of the Roman evolution from paganism to Christianity that had accompanied the slow decline of the old Western empire.

The fact that the only religious invaders in the area had been Muslim and they had taken Christian people by force did not matter to the Mahdi and his followers, for the Quran told them to “fight against those who have been given the scripture but do not believe in Allah.” And again, “wage war on the idolaters, as they wage war on you.”

So ancient prophecy came true on that night, when the Whore of Babylon at last was brought low, Rome, the treasure-house of the Western spirit.

The fire swept down, charging the roof of the Sistine Chapel with far more pressure than it could bear. Unseen by any man, a fissure appeared between the finger of Adam and the finger of God, snapped, and spread, and in the next instant the greatest artistic expression ever created by the human hand was atomized dust speeding and vaporizing in the searing heat.

The doors of the Vatican Library smashed inward, comets blazing fire, and librarians looked up and were made hollow, and papyrus and parchment began burning with a fury never known before. The Codex Vaticanus, with its careful script, leaped into flame and was gone in an instant. When this early Bible was transcribed, ancient Rome still ruled the world and the hand, neat and Greek, that had done the work had belonged to a human being who had looked upon the soaring marbles of the Temple of Jupiter, and heard the roar of the crowd in the Coliseum, and the thunder of horses in the Circus Maximus, and shopped in the ink-sour bookstores along the Argilitum in the jammed quarter called the Subura, to which the Roman poet Juvenal attributed “the thousand dangers of a savage city.”

The library then imploded, and the Vatican Museum, and the great church itself, the skylights in its dome briefly spitting columns of fire into
the interior, making it look as if the spokes of a great wheel of fire had invaded the space. In grand silence, as a young priest twisted toward the Blessed Sacrament that lay in the golden Tabernacle on the altar, the dome came down in great blocks, shattering the altar, the priest, the floor, and crashing with such force that parts of the nave collapsed into the crypt below, and in the tomb of Saint Peter there resounded a noise never heard there or anywhere else, the shrieking, weeping thunder of thousands of tons of concrete and art pulverizing.

The tombs of the popes were smashed, broken open, cracked, remains strewn and then set ablaze, ancient vestments and bones coming to lazy fire in the wrecked marble, fitful red pools flickering in the thick dark.

The great glass wall before the crypt of Saint Peter smashed into dust, and the lights there fluttered out. An instant later, debris from the floor of the church above smashed down, filling the space with stone that would not be removed again, not even in vast time.

The glare of the explosion lit the south side of the Piazza Navona, causing it to burst into flames. People thronging the north side were astonished by what they saw—awnings, cars, diners at their meals in the mild night—suddenly all was fire. Before the blast struck, two seconds passed, during which a woman started to raise her hands to the flaming skin of her face, a waiter threw a glass of Cinzano he was carrying, cats scurried in the alley, a Chinese woman, achingly lonely, realized that she would die in the kitchen that was bursting into raging, inexplicable fire around her. She had been dreaming, as she shook a skillet of mushrooms over the belching stove, of rain in May in the hills of home.

The ancient treasure-house that was Rome trembled as if being shaken by the fist of God. The Senate House of Diocletian in the Forum sank into itself, the oldest parliamentary structure in the world. The Pantheon, perhaps the finest piece of architecture on the planet, finally, after over two thousand years testifying to the orderly dignity of the human spirit, collapsed in on itself with a dusty sigh.

Dust and smoke rushed everywhere, gushing through narrow streets, howling in eaves, crashing through windows. By the millions, roof tiles swept into the air, shattered, and became a kind of red snow by which the disaster would long be remembered, after the helicopters came in the morning and the glittering camera eyes returned images of the ruined city dyed red.

The bomb was not as large as the one that had shattered Las Vegas. This one had been meant to destroy a symbol, not kill a community. But however carefully this evil act had been conceived, nuclear destruction remained something that was really beyond imagination, and its effects were far more terrible than its planners had anticipated.

They had probably imagined a neat decapitation of the Vatican, not what actually occurred. Of course, Vatican City was destroyed, with virtually all of its treasures, the accumulation of so many years and so much human genius that it was like killing a part of an eternal soul.

Not since the Arabs had attempted conquest of Italy in 846 had Muslim violence been directly enacted against Rome. In that year, the Saracens had robbed the Basilica of St. Peter, which was then outside the city walls.

But this was not robbery, it was devastation, and moments after the explosion the Vatican appeared as a sort of mountain wreathed in smoke. The great, welcoming arms of the basilica, designed by Bernini in the seventeenth century, were splayed outward, their colonnades tossed like matchsticks, the statues of the saints rendered into dust. The piazza itself was crushed down into its own foundations, becoming a blackened pit.

The Egyptian obelisk in the center had shattered. It had been moved there in 1586 from the nearby ruins of the Circus of Caligula, where it had been brought around the year 40. The absence of hieroglyphics on the obelisk had made its origin a mystery, but in any case, like so much that was destroyed on this night, it belonged to the depths of time and human consciousness. Its disappearance, although never remarked anywhere, left each human being less, as the loss of St. Peter’s, the libraries, the Sistine Chapel, the museums, and also the people of the Vatican themselves, consecrated as they were to carrying on their shoulders one of the deepest of Western institutions, left all people immeasurably less.

In that instant of breathtaking cruelty and evil, the soul of man was made smaller, and a dark, brutal future seemed ready to spread in the hidden space within us all where the emblems that construct our civilizations are inscribed. Again, as in Las Vegas, it was the details—always the details—that were the places where the catastrophe was actually defined.

For example, the area around the obelisk was completely shattered but not completely lost, as some of the emblems of the winds—Ponente, the West Wind; Tramontana, the North Wind—that were embedded in the piazza
there, were flung in the debris for kilometers and landed in the gardens of the Villa Borghese across the Tiber. These gardens, which were swept as if by a howling storm as the debris from the Vatican came pouring from the sky, had first been planted by old Roman republicans such as the populist ally of Julius Caesar, Sallust, and the libertine Lucullus, who used to organize torch races among the ancestors of some of the trees that were now burning down to the root, never to grow again. On this night, the trees themselves became the torches.

The baldachin that overhung the great altar of St. Peter’s smashed down into it, followed by most of the dome above, which led to the collapse of the crypt and drove the fires deep, where they would burn on for nearly a year.

All the colleges, the abbeys, the institutes of the Vatican burst into flames. People who were not killed outright were set alight, and dashed burning against collapsing walls. In the end, nine out of every ten people in Vatican City were killed outright. The others, their bodies broken and burned, ruined by radiation, died within hours or days. Of the city’s 820 permanent residents, only 11 were still alive twenty-four hours after the blast. Another 216 employees who were in the city at the time of the explosion were all killed.

Thus the entire central government of the Roman Catholic Church ceased in a moment to exist. But the damage did not end at the borders of Vatican City, which was, after all, a 108-acre enclave in the center of a dense metropolis.

The Mufti was an old man and sleeping heavily when he burst into flames. He awoke to red haze and pain and then was dead. So, ironically, perhaps, the second great sack of Rome by Muslims also took the life of one of the most radical of Muslim leaders, but not one so radical as to countenance open and frank evil.

At midnight, Rome was a sparkling, vividly alive city. Clubs were open, restaurants, theaters, bars, and coffee shops. People thronged the piazzas, the streets. On the sheltered side of the Navona, there was an eruption of complete panic, with people leaping sidewalk chairs and tables, dashing into the cover afforded by restaurant interiors, as the patrons inside rushed out.

As the enormous, killing flash struck, there were uncountable moments of horror and confusion. Nobody within two kilometers of the blast actually
heard it. Instead, they lost their hearing, being left with ringing or silence or hammering sounds in their heads, their ears bleeding, some of them blinded, but fewer than in Las Vegas, where more open space had led to wider sight lines.

The whole center of Rome became a gigantic trap. Pushed down by the same overpressure that had crushed St. Peter’s, buildings across the city collapsed into the streets, blocking all escape. People on lower floors mostly survived, rushing out to avoid the choking fire that gushed down from the upper levels of structures, poured along stairways, smashed ceilings, and brought with it a dense cloud of smoke and dust.

Four minutes after the blast, the power failed. That it had lasted so long was due only to the heroic efforts of station engineers in surrounding areas, none of whom knew exactly what had happened, but who flipped switches and turned knobs, moving loads in a flash around the country. But it was no use, the system had taken extraordinary damage, and no sooner had Rome gone down than the whole grid faltered and the entire southern half of the country was plunged into darkness.

For all of their years of training and preparation for even the worst catastrophe, across the entire center of the city the fire brigade was rendered helpless. This was not because of the power failure. They could operate without power, and even deliver substantial water using only their own generating equipment. They were prepared to draw huge quantities of water from the Tiber, but they could not reach the Tiber, not with so many streets hopelessly blocked. Indeed, the spectacle that Rome presented after the explosion was of a complicated mass of destroyed towers and roofs floating in a sea of burning rubble. Few streets were even visible.