Paradox (25 page)

"Oh." He calmed down. A moment later, once more leaning together for
mutual support, the two hobbled up the west bank of the pond, with the little
waterfall outflow burbling right beside them.
They found themselves face-to-face with a line of bearded men with long coats,
stalking toward them through the scrub beyond the streambed. Their shadows were
grim decisive lines before them. They were fifty yards off; evidently they had
withdrawn a healthy distance when the napalm-fall spilled over the cliff.
Now they were back, with weapons at their hips. Catching sight of the sodden
pair they shouted in triumph. The Kalashnikovs came up.
Again the sky screamed. This time a strange snarling joined the jet engine's
banshee cry.
The men in front of Annja started coming apart in quick sprays of red. It was
as if they were strange puppets stuffed with firecrackers, not real living,
breathing men. They weren't being cut down. They
exploded
.
A slim shape swept low overhead from right to left, passing above the smoking
remnants of the men it had destroyed. If there were any survivors they had had
the sense to go down fast and try their damnedest to become one with the
planet. Annja whipped her head counterclockwise to see a fighter aircraft, its
delta wings and a slim, tubular fuselage orange in the light of the setting
sun, pull up from its strafing run. She could see the single yellow flame of
its exhaust.
More snarling broke out overhead. Annja and Levi ducked as big noisy explosions
started going off on the flats to the west of the stream. Clouds of dirt and
smoke flew everywhere. Things flew through the air—rocks, shattered weapons,
tubular objects shoddily wrapped in flapping cloth. Those last bits didn't bear
too much thinking about. Especially when a detached arm bounced not fifteen
feet away from Annja and rolled to a stop. The carnage was everywhere.
Annja realized that a pair of shapes like gigantic mutant dragonflies were
hovering a hundred feet in the air, turning and dipping this way and that. They
were behind all the racket. Machine cannons mounted beneath their domed bulging
snouts and rocket pods beneath their stub wings were ripping holy Hell out of
the
peshmerga
.
"Oh, my God, they're Hinds!" Annja exclaimed.
She glanced at Levi. He was staring slack-jawed up at the flying monsters. She
wasn't sure how much he could see without his glasses, but whatever it was he
saw, he wasn't making any sense at all out of it.
"You know," she said. "Russian helicopters. Like, from Soviet
times."
She realized she was babbling. She also realized he almost certainly couldn't
hear her. If the earlier outburst of fire from the Kurds had sounded like the
Fourth of July, this sounded as if they'd decided to move the pyrotechnic
display into the drained-out hold of an oil tanker.
Still, she felt relief. She was pretty sure. She didn't actually understand
what was going on any better than Levi seemed to. But the horrible deadly
aircraft weren't shooting at
them
. In fact they were shooting at the
guys who were going to shoot at them.
"That has to be good, right?" she said it aloud, as if she'd spoken
the thoughts preceding. Which was all good, since just now her thoughts were as
audible as her words were.
What was going on around them didn't seem to be a battle as much as it was a
massacre. Annja realized that if you had to be in a battle, that was definitely
the kind of battle to be in. Provided you weren't on the side getting
slaughtered.
She was pretty sure she'd feel horrible later for thinking that.
A sudden blast of wind beat down upon them. Annja looked up, almost
overbalancing and toppling back into the pond as she saw another huge shape
dropping toward them below a flashing circle of rotor.
It settled down to land on retractable wheels not thirty yards from them. Annja
and Levi just stood and gaped despite the bits of dirt and dried vegetable
stuff getting blown in their faces. It wasn't as if they were going to run from
a helicopter. Even if they had all their legs in working order.
This was a different model chopper, looking even bigger than the huge,
grotesque gunships, more resembling a pregnant guppy than an armed dragonfly.
A hatch opened in the side closest to them. Out spilled a bunch of guys in
salwar
kameez
and Chitrali caps, serious beard shadows and angry moustaches, all
of them carrying Kalashnikov rifles and one or two light machine guns with drum
magazines. As the helicopter's twin turbine engines throttled down with a whine
the Afghan-looking men fanned out to set up a defensive perimeter. In case
anybody still cared.
Down from the chopper stepped a tall pale-skinned man, inexpressibly natty in a
fedora and a tan London Fog coat.
"Ms. Creed," he said politely, above the
shoop-shoop
of the
big slowing rotors. "Rabbi Leibowitz."
"Are we rescued or being taken prisoner?" Annja asked feebly.
"Yes," the man said.
"All right," Annja said. "This is officially too much."
And she passed out from exhaustion.

Annja opened her eyes.
There was a nurse doing something next to her bed by a cheery yellow light. Or
Annja thought she was a nurse, from her crisp white-and-green uniform and the
little white old-timey cap perched atop her head.
Apparently sensing the patient had awakened she turned to smile at Annja. She
was a young woman, pretty, dark, with raven-black hair bobbed short beneath her
paper cap.
She left the room without saying anything. A spray of cheerful yellow flowers
stuck up out of a pearlescent ceramic vase on a table beside Annja's bed. Annja
didn't know what they were. Maybe some kind of daisies? An ethnobotanist she
wasn't.
Beyond the flowers stood another bed. In it Rabbi Levi Leibowitz, dressed in
white pajamas with gray pinstripes, lay propped up against a pile of pillows.
He had a bandage plastered right across the bridge of his nose. He blinked at
her through what she dimly understood must be new glasses perched on the
bandage and smiled shyly.
"Levi," she croaked. "You made it."
"Hi, Annja," he said. "You, too. I guess our gods won out after
all."
"What's with the bandage?" she asked.
"Zach Thompson broke my nose, remember? They fixed it. Cosmetic surgery.
They seem pretty good at it."
"Who?"
"The doctors here."
"Where is here?" she asked.
"Welcome to Yerevan," a masculine voice said from behind her. She had
only heard that dry tone and clipped intonation once before. Even so, she knew
there was no way she would ever forget it.
"Who are you?" she said, fairly certain she had a good idea. She
turned to look at the man who sat in a wooden chair beside the window. The
bright morning sun rushing in obscured him in its glare.
She decided to test her theory. "So the United States is currently friends
with Armenia?" she asked.
"Armenia is friendly to us. And that's what really matters, isn't
it?" the man said.
"I suppose. Yeah," she replied, not sure she really wanted to know
what was going on. It was never a good thing when government agents showed up
out of nowhere. Even if they did save your life. She had the sinking feeling
there might be people out there who knew more about her than she wanted them
to.
The man crossed long slim legs and leaned forward slightly to clasp his knee
with pale spidery hands.
"I have to thank you both for the show you put on. It made for highly
entertaining viewing," he said.
"What are you talking about?" Levi asked.
"You didn't have a satellite tasked to watch us?" Annja asked.
"Oh, no." He shook his narrow head. "You did, however, occupy
the undivided attention of your own personal Global Hawk remotely piloted
aircraft."
Feeling suddenly weary Annja shook her head. "We never had a clue."
"That's kind of the point of a spy drone, isn't it?"
"So what about those aircraft that…rescued us, I guess?" she said.
"Rescued you, indeed."
"The Hinds and the fighter plane, whatever it was—"
"Sukhoi Su-17. Fitter-C. Ground attack plane, actually. Rather elderly but
gets the job done. We can all aspire to that, can't we?"
"Were they Armenian?"
"Oh, yes."
"But…we were in Turkey."
She sensed as much as saw his thin smile.
"Hot pursuit of Muslim terrorists covers a multitude of sins, in these
years of the Long War, " the man said.
"I see. And those dudes with you in the helicopter?"
"Baluchi mercenaries. Don't waste your breath asking," he said
politely.
"'Course not," Annja replied wearily.
He leaned back and draped an arm over the back of his wooden chair.
"I'd like to offer you both, on what we might call an official unofficial
basis, the profound thanks of the United States of America."
"What for?" Levi asked.
"You've helped to tie up a number of ends, which, if left loose, posed
major threats to national security."
"Like what?" Levi blurted.
"Leif Baron, for one. He'd become a loose cannon. He spent so much time
working among and with Islamic crazies that some people were starting to say
he'd forgotten which side he was really on."
Annja frowned. She couldn't quite buy that. Baron was a psychopath and a
fanatic, but treason would violate his self-image. And he was unlikely to join
Muslims waging war against Christianity.
Or am I wrong about that? she found herself wondering. It wasn't as if she'd
actually known him well. Maybe Baron the religious zealot had found not a new
faith, but rather alliance, with spirits far more akin to his than those of the
West's decadent materialists, who seemed bent on abandoning all religion. She'd
read right-wing American fundamentalist tracts in praise of Islamic fervor.
She said nothing. Arguing with government mystery men was not a fruitful
pastime.
But Levi didn't know that yet.
"That doesn't make any sense," he said flatly. "I can't believe
the government would carry out such a convoluted scheme, just on, what? The
off-chance of eliminating a single suspected rogue? It's just too…too Rube
Goldberg. There's got to be more to it."
"Of course there is," Annja said. "And we'll never find out what
it is. Our expedition might have served to cover any number of different ends
or operations," she explained.
"Thank you for talking sense, Ms. Creed," the man said.
"Say," Levi said. "What about the Assyrian tablet? It was in the
pocket of my pants. What happened to it? It must be extremely valuable."
"I'm sorry, Rabbi Leibowitz," the man said. "Anything other than
personal effects you might've brought down the mountain have been confiscated
in the interests of national security. For reasons that should be obvious, they
cannot be returned."
"But it's a priceless artifact! Its historical significance is beyond
question—"
"What its significance is," the man said, "is moot. Please
understand, Rabbi. Ms. Creed certainly does. What you think you recall
happening up on Ararat never really happened."
Levi sent Annja a pleading look. She shook her head sadly.
"What
really
happened," the government agent said, "as
will shortly be made public, is that your expedition proved the Ararat Anomaly
was simply a basalt formation. It's geological, not any kind of human
artifact."
"What?" Annja said. "I saw it. It was definitely human-built. It
was—" She stopped, frowning.
Not a ship
, she realized with sudden
shock. That quickly turned to chagrin at not seeing it earlier.
"It's a temple, Annja," Levi said. "Constructed partially out of
wood, hauled painstakingly up that terrible peak for obscure but obviously
powerful religious reasons."
He shrugged. "I suppose it's not any weirder than Stonehenge or the
Terra-cotta Army, is it, really? And don't feel bad that we didn't figure it
out earlier. We were sort of busy."
The government agent smiled. "The Anomaly is just a rock," he
repeated. "Sadly, unexpectedly savage weather caused an avalanche that
tragically wiped out the rest of your expedition. The world is very fortunate
that Ms. Creed and Rabbi Leibowitz survived to tell the truth about the fate of
the expedition and what they found. You're both heroes."
Annja did not miss the fact that he emphasized the word
truth
.
"And that truth is what you're scheduled to tell the eager global media in
a press conference tomorrow," he said. "Should anyone suggest
otherwise, that will constitute an extreme breach of national security. There
will be no trial. The matter will be settled covertly."
Levi shook his head in disbelief. "So the ancient Assyrian relic we
brought back—excuse me,
didn't
bring back—goes where? To that warehouse
where they put the Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones movie?"
The government agent swung his cocked leg back and forth. "You have a
highly active imagination, Rabbi."
"But what interest could the U.S. government possibly have in keeping
something like this secret?" Annja asked. "The Ark—Noah's Ark—hasn't got anything to do with national security."
"It does when the country's run by born-agains!" Levi said.
"Should that circumstance ever have pertained, Rabbi Leibowitz," the
man said, calm as ever, "it no longer does, I can assure you. The inmates
proved inadequate to the task of running the asylum.
"As to how such arcana impacts the nation's security, Ms. Creed, you might
be surprised. Be aware that, above all, the U.S. government, in common with the
other governments of the Earth, has a vested interest in maintaining order.
That includes the accepted order of things. Including the public understanding
of the world and how it works. That in turn encompasses large areas of
scientific and, we might even say, esoteric knowledge."
"What?" Levi said. "You mean flying saucers? Cold fusion?
Antigravity? This is ridiculous. You can't be serious!"
"I'll leave you now," the man said, rising. "You need to rest up
for your big press conference tomorrow. In a couple of hours some of our media
specialists will meet with you to help you prepare."
He left the room quietly.
When the door shut behind him Levi turned to Annja. "What are we going to
say?" he pleaded.
"Whatever they want us to say," she replied dully.
"Why won't you resist them? I thought you were a fighter."
"I am when there's something worth fighting for," she said quietly.
"But the
truth
—we can get the truth out! If not at the press
conference, then over the Internet!"
"No, Levi," Annja said. "Believe me. We can't."
He sank back. "You know what you're talking about, don't you?" he
said weakly. "You've done this sort of thing before."
"Yes, unfortunately I have," she said.
Tears welled up in his eyes and rolled down cheeks peeling with sun and wind
burn, into a beard neatly trimmed by Armenian nurses.
"So it was all in vain. Those poor deluded young men. Mr. Atabeg. Even…even
the Kurds, who died for something they thought was worthwhile. All the pain.
All the blood."
"No, Levi. It wasn't in vain," Annja said.
"But we failed."
"No."
Blinking away tears, he looked at her, confused.
"We went up the mountain to find something, remember?" she asked
gently.
"The truth about the Anomaly." He spoke haltingly, as if he suspected
some kind of verbal trap.
"Yes. And that's what we did, isn't? We learned the truth, you and I. We
found it and we brought it back alive. And if we can never share it with the
rest of the world—
we
know. They can never take that away from us, can
they?"
He looked at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, he smiled.
"No," he said. "No, I guess they can't."
He lay back. He seemed exhausted. He probably was, given what he'd been
through. For that matter, so was she. Even though she felt only a little
residual pain in her right hip and ankle, suggesting those injuries had been
minor, it would take time to get her strength back. She'd been right up to the
edge. And as far beyond it as she ever had been before.
"Annja?" Levi said in a small voice.
"Yes, Levi?"
"If this is what victory feels like, may the Lord preserve me from ever
knowing defeat."
"Amen," she said.