Target: Point Zero (26 page)

It was brutal, grinding, high tech warfare at its worst, and all of it was taking place near the first real city on the planet, on top of the sands which had long ago buried the Garden of Eden.

It might have seemed like an odd thing then, that all of the soldiers on both sides of this hellish battle were fanatically religious. In all their previous clashes, they had stopped fighting at precisely 4 P.M. to take a ten-minute, bow-and-prayer break. Each side believed dying in battle was a sure way to heaven, and that to run from a fight meant a one-way ticket into hell. Each side also believed that the only entity that could call a halt to a religious war was God Himself—and this they took very seriously. During each battle, special officers on both sides would simply observe the fighting as it was taking place, looking for signs that the Almighty wanted the hostilities to stop. It was called a
quar’wey
—the sign from above. Of course, these heavenly things weren’t spotted very often. In the forty thousand-year history of Qum and Uruk, a
quar’wey
had been spotted only once, and that, scholars believed, was at the end of the war which ultimately destroyed the first city of Uruk.

Still, in between loading their weapons and slaughtering their neighbors, the soldiers on both sides of the battle lines were babbling prayers, beseeching God to produce the sign and end the fighting. To be fair, some of the soldiers did this little ritual rather routinely; but many others took it very gravely. Yet no matter how deep their faith, everyone knew the likelihood of anything like a
quar’wey
happening was just about nil and all this religious stuff was probably just a way to keep everyone praying and thereby
focused
during a battle.

But then, everything changes eventually—even if it takes forty thousand years to do so.

No one on the Uruk side of the line knew exactly why their enemies from Qum decided to attack the city’s air base.

True, the runway was nearly three miles long, being built in secret shortly after the first Gulf War by the American CIA in anticipation of a second conflict.

The people at Uruk utilized the long airstrip certainly—they had several medium-sized bombers and fighters that found the fifteen thousand foot-runway a dream to operate from. But Qum had no aircraft, and even if it had, it would be hard pressed to find anyone to fly them. The people of Qum were called
neyetah,
people of the earth. Airplanes, rockets and things of this nature held no interest for them.

So why then were they trying to take over Uruk’s airport?

Some would later say, that Qum was actually hired to do it; paid off by some mysterious people to the east. Others would say the whole thing was a mistake and that the Qum forces were simply attacking Uruk proper and faced unusually stiff opposition at the airport. Still others would say that many of the fighters for Qum had become convinced that God himself was going to come out of the sky in a huge flaming chariot to support them in their cause—but he needed a really long runway on which to land.

In the end though, it didn’t matter much. In this battle, something so important was about to happen, all questions of why the Qum chose this day to try and capture the big airport would be lost.

For on this day, for the first time since the pivotal Battle of Shajk-ree forty thousand years before, both sides witnessed a
quar’wey
—the sign from above.

It happened shortly after dawn, just as the battle at the airport was moving into its third hour. Already more than three thousand men had been killed on each side, twice that many wounded or missing. In the tiny confines of the airport’s taxiways, the fighting had turned to bayonets and sharpened swords, all while massive pieces of mobile artillery battered each other from three hundred feet away. Suddenly a screech was heard—the sound of many women screaming at once, was how someone would later put it. It was so loud, men on both sides stopped what they were doing and gazed upwards.

That’s when everyone saw it. A huge flying machine, diving down out of the clear morning sky, its wings and tail and body shimmering in the bright, newly risen sun. It looked gigantic, terrifying. Unreal.

And it was heading right for the airport.

This was a frightening sight to see for many of the troops, on both sides. Never had they beheld such a large aircraft before. Whether the soldiers for Qum thought the beast was on the side of Uruk and vice versa, no one would ever really know. As soon as the flying monster screeched again and dropped even more steeply towards the airport, many soldiers on both sides threw down their weapons and ran away.

Was this God? Coming down out of the heavens as the rumors said He would? Was this why the soldiers from Qum had been so determined to take the airport on this, of all days? Was this an authentic
quar’wey?

No, not really. But in the end, that didn’t make any difference either.

The huge flying monster drew closer, its color scheme was so black, it was actually shiny. It had huge swept-back wings and four propjet engines that were smoking so badly they appeared to be on fire. The great aircraft swooped down on the airport and dropped fifteen bombs, one right after another, in a perfect row along the entire length of the long runway—all from a heartstopping height of three hundred fifty feet. There followed a string of fifteen near-simultaneous explosions, mixed with the unearthly shriek of the plane’s engines as it pulled up and roared away over the horizon.

Then, strangely, everything went silent on the battlefield. When the smoke cleared, troops on both sides saw the three-mile long runway had been cratered right down its middle. Huge chunks of rock and dirt now covered it from beginning to end. The combined impact of the fifteen bombs dropping from such a short height had been so intense, it had even ignited the asphalt itself in places.

One look at the bombed-out airstrip told them it would never ever be used again.

To the religious people on both sides, this was indeed their
quar’wey,
the indication from God that they should stop fighting now, as it had finally come to displease Him. Commanders on both sides looked to their religious officers who called it a miracle, an official legitimate “sign from above.”

Trumpets on both sides began blaring and men who could still walk and talk let out a great cheer of celebration. Almost immediately the mobile artillery on both sides began backing up and leaving the field. Joyous troops followed them. A war that had been fought off and on over the last four hundred centuries had finally been called a draw by the Almighty himself.

There was no longer any need to fight each other, ever again. At last, everyone could throw down their weapons and go home.

I
T WAS GETTING COLD
again up on the flight compartment of the Zon shuttle.

They had just passed back into the Earth’s shadow, and now, all the brilliant direct sunshine they’d been relishing gave way to a bitter, metallic cold. There was no gradual warming or cooling up here in space. One second you could be blazing hot—the next, you’re frozen solid. Once you were off the planet, very few things actually fell in between.

The Zon’s captive pilot pulled the collar of his flight suit further up around his neck and shook off the creeping chill. The doom and gloom of the Earth’s shadow would last only ninety minutes or so. But each time it happened, his cockpit got a little colder, just as the wait for the sun seemed to get a little longer.

He’d long ago begun to curse these ninety-minute retreats into the darkness; cursed the frigidity they brought with them. He’d come to believe, whether it was rational or not, that if he was just left alone in the sun for any length of time, he would begin to regain the mental faculties he’d lost during the two years of brutal mindwashing. If only he could lay out on the beach with a bucket of suds, some food and some girls—just like he used to do. Then, he was sure he would start to remember things, like who he was, and his name, and how the hell he’d gotten into this strange predicament in the first place.

But now it was cold and dark again and he had many problems literally floating in front of his face. Despite his best efforts to keep the flight compartment clean and contaminant-free, he’d been corralling tiny droplets and weightless specks of unhealthy materials all morning long. Just what these things were floating up from the disgust of the crew compartment, he didn’t know. There were certainly pieces of cocaine drifting about, and the yellow drops he had to assume were urine. But other strange black things that didn’t quite appear solid or liquid were besieging him in vast numbers. It was all he could do to keep vacuuming them out of the air, knowing that just one tiny piece of something could gum up the works for all of them.

But keeping the flight deck clean was actually the least of the pilot’s worries. He had two potential crises looming that made his orbital housecleaning compulsions pale by comparison.

The first had to do with the Mir space station. He had successfully maneuvered the Zon close to the Mir’s rear receiving ring about six hours ago. As these things go, it had been an uneventful rendezvous. Only one crewman from the Zon died in the attempt, again from electrical shock when he first made contact with the Mir while putting the universal communications tether in place. Previous attempts at such linkings had cost the lives of as many as seven crewmen, as well as some people living on the Mir. To lose just one life this time made some people in both orbiting crafts think that they were actually getting good at this type of thing.

But not the pilot—he knew they’d just been lucky and that getting entangled with the Mir would always be a deadly operation. His problem now was how to disengage from the space station when it was time, and try not to cause heavy damage to either the shuttle or the Mir. The problem was that the universal wire snigger tended to freeze up in the cold of space; when it was time to unlink it was usually stuck to the point that only the pulling away of both spacecraft could break the seal. This was highly dangerous as the Zon could easily rip away a section of the Mir, or vice versa while unlinking. All it would take was the slightest crack in the skin of either and everyone aboard the unlucky craft would the horribly in the vacuum of space about twelve seconds later.

But there was an even bigger crisis looming ahead for the pilot—one that he, nor anyone else aboard the Zon had any control over whatsoever. This problem was of earthly origin—where were they going to land once it was time to go back down? The pilot had been receiving with increasing frequency, near-hysterical reports from the Zon’s communications section that all the alternate landing sites previously thought to be either “secure” or “securable” were now anything but.

First the Star City landing strip had been fouled, and then the primary backup strip on the island of Malta. Now the pilot had just received a message saying that another location, a midorbital secondary site located in the desert of old Iraq, had just been destroyed as well.

What was going on here?
the pilot asked himself over and over again. Were these just coincidences? Not unlikely events considering the state of the planet Earth these days? Or was someone down there determined not to let them land?

The pilot pondered this last possibility for the longest time. It would have to be a very clever person, or a group of such, to actually find and destroy every available landing site the Zon could use while locked into its present orbital status.

It seemed as if he knew such people, way back when, in that part of his life that had been so brutally erased. But trying to remember who they were only made his head hurt—and in zero-gravity, every headache was a killer.

So he stopped thinking about these lost memories and dragged his mind back to the matter at hand. A formation of yellow urine bubbles came floating by; the pilot eliminated them with his small handheld vacuum cleaner, and then snidely pretended to blow smoke away from the sucker’s barrel.

Down below, was a vast, dark section of the Atlantic Ocean. The water looked like ink; the clouds above it very stormy.

The pilot pulled his collar up further and shook off another deeper chill.

He believed it would be a long time before he saw the sun again.

T
HERE WAS ONLY ONE
way to fully comprehend the size of the Great Middle Eastern desert: fly over it.

It went on forever. In every direction, for hundreds of kilometers, there was nothing but sand, mountains, and more sand. The only break in this bleak landscape was the sparkling greenish waters of the Persian Gulf. This sea looked very much out of place, as if it had been forever struggling just to moisten the dry terrain below. The fact that there were literally billions of barrels of oil still sitting beneath this strange piece of Terra made the mix even more bizarre. It was the closest thing one could get to passing over an alien planet.

So Hunter was glad when the big Bear finally left the Arabian desert behind, skirted the top of the Gulf and passed over into Asia. Below them now was the rugged, equally bleak land once known as Persia, and then Iran, and now Persia again.

This was a strange place in itself. The country below looked as it might have thousands of years ago—except its coastline was dotted with supertankers left rusting after an innumerable string of armed conflicts. There was evidence of small wars still going on eight miles beneath the Tu-95; clouds of smoke rising here, a burned-out city there. Village against village, tribe against tribe, the whole place appeared to have reverted back to life as it was centuries before, with the thought of all the oil buried beneath
its
top layer apparently lost in the giant step backward.

So while there was evidence of civilization down below, Hunter could see no runways, no highways, not even a clear stretch of flat hard terrain that could be utilized by the shuttle if it chose to set down on an unprepared landing strip. This was fine with him; the last thing he wanted was to challenge Viktor in the wilds of modern Persia.