Threatcon Delta (28 page)

D
urst dropped forward on his knees.

“
Ich bin hier!
” he cried.

Carla gasped softly and darted after the elderly man, but he wasn’t hurt. He flopped onto his chest and scurried forward, pushing with his knees, brushing sand aside with swimming motions of his arms, clearing the way to a spot across from where his eyes were fixed like little machines. He reached a place where the missing tank tread would have rested on the stone wall of the well.

“I’m all right,” he said with annoyance as Carla fell in beside him. “Get me a flashlight!
A flashlight!
”

Phair and Kealey were both nonplussed by his actions. Kealey had a penlight hooked to his key ring. He slipped it off and handed it to Carla, who gave it to her grandfather. Shaking as though he were stricken, Durst probed the darkness with the light. He swept the beam left to right, right to left, then up and down. Kealey had a sick feeling at the top of his throat.

“Gone,” the German said at last.

Kealey walked to Durst’s side and squatted. He glanced into the well. The light was still now, as though Durst had stopped living. Kealey saw a dark rectangle among the stones, an opening in the well wall. There was nothing inside.

The agent’s first and most frightening thought was that the bad guys had it. If that was the case, the problem just became different and far more difficult. His mind raced through the ramifications, none of them hopeful.

Durst just lay there, moaning, oblivious to the sands blowing over him. He had not been speaking to his granddaughter nor to the men who stood over him. He was lamenting to no one in particular.

“Come,” Carla said.

Durst rose unsteadily, helped by Kealey and Carla. His eyes suddenly looked tired. With hardly any effort, as though he were all bones, they helped him to the vehicle. Kealey crouched beside him. He recovered his small flashlight, tucked it in his shirt pocket, and tried to get Durst’s attention by moving his eyes to align with the German’s dull, staring ones.

“Talk to me,” Kealey said. “How do you know it’s gone? It might have just fallen into—”

“I saw the missing stone under the opposite tread wheel,” Durst said. “It had been lifted away.”

“How is that possible?” Kealey asked. “Who else knew about this?”

“No one living,” Durst replied dully.

Kealey rose and walked around the tank. He leaned against it, pushing to check for stability, as much as a push could determine. Then he lowered himself onto his belly and wormed underneath along the line of the other missing tread. The way the tank was positioned, he couldn’t go far enough to reach the opening. The tank had obviously been damaged by a mine—there were scorch marks along a hole in the undercarriage—and then backed over the well, ending up with its tail angled down like this. The relic must have been concealed afterward. The men in the tank wouldn’t have wanted to carry anything they didn’t have to, walking from the desert.

A spike had been driven into the top side of the well. Recently, since the steel was still silver and unpocked by sands. The flashlight revealed hemp threads snagged by the topmost block of the well. Someone had come here, lowered himself over the side, and taken the Staff of Moses.

His first conclusion, perhaps as unfair as it was instinctive, was that Durst had an ally whom he had called during the night. But the German seemed as surprised as the rest to find the hiding place violated. Kealey didn’t think he was that good an actor. But who else could have done this? If this had been a professional operation, something run by Harper or someone else at the CIA—for reasons Kealey couldn’t quite fathom—they wouldn’t have been careless enough to leave traces of the intrusion. Everything would have been replaced and properly aged so that when Kealey and company went in, sand would have fallen from the cracks when they removed the block, suggesting that the object had been taken years before, the trail cold.

No,
Kealey thought,
this was recent and nonprofessional.
Which raised an alarming possibility: that the artifact being employed on Mt. Sinai was the genuine Staff of Moses. Not that Kealey believed it could perform miracles, but what he believed didn’t matter. If the people behind that movement had the actual Staff and some kind of provenance to go with it, the problem he faced just got a whole lot worse. In fact, if anyone had followed them, photographed them, the images could be used as evidence to support the claim that this was the genuine article. Why else would the government of the United States be out here with the Nazi who had stolen it?

Phair ambled over. “This could be the work of a religious organization,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The Vatican’s Safe Harbor League, the Sons of Joshua, some group that has field operatives,” he said. “For all we know they’ve been watching Durst for decades, waiting for him to make his move. They may have picked off this information at any time since we landed.”

“Why not just go to his house and beat it out of him?” Kealey asked, a little angry at himself. Perhaps they hadn’t been as secretive as they should have been.

“In the case of the Church, these material missionaries are men of peace,” Phair replied in a venerating tone. “They acquire merit through patience and charity.”

“Or they knew he was under the protection of a gangster, too,” Kealey said, abruptly dismissing Phair’s thick piety.

Kealey studied the well and removed a few of the strands from the stone wall before wriggling back out. He tucked them in his passport and walked over to the others.

“I don’t understand how anyone could have known,” Durst said. He looked as if he were in a daze.

“Could your satellites tell us anything about who has been out here?” Carla asked Kealey.

“There is so much going on in this part of the world, we’re not able to keep satellites trained on every region,” he said. “Absent a specific reason, we tend to watch the trouble spots, and the Western Sahara isn’t one of them.”

“Someone may have been here within the past few hours,” she said. “If you looked now, in the surrounding region—”

“It would take about ninety minutes to make the calls and get the coordinates changed,” he said. “The perpetrators will be long gone.” He regarded Durst. “Are you sure there were no other records of your work?”

“I am positive,” he replied, his voice catching, near tears. “
Positive!
”

“I need you to think back,” Kealey said. “Tell me everything the Russians said when you told them about your work.”

“How can I?” he said. “They were speaking Russian!”

“What use would the Russians have for the Staff
now
?” Carla asked.

“None that I can think of,” Kealey admitted.

“It may not be the Russians,” Phair said. He was standing a few paces away from the group.

“Who, then?” Kealey asked.

“There were some eighty million Muslims living in the Soviet Union, in Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan,” Phair said. “One of those people, someone who was not a ‘godless peasant,’ may have read the file and grasped its value.”

“Why not go after the Staff then?” Carla asked.

“To what purpose?” Phair replied. “The Kremlin would have confiscated it.”

“A common soldier wouldn’t have been free to go after it,” Kealey said. “But there’s another possibility.”

The others looked at him.

“During the war with Chechnya, Muslim collaborators had access to KGB personnel,” Kealey explained. “After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the KGB was disbanded, hundreds of unemployed operatives were happy to sell information about enriched uranium, double agents, pretty much anything they knew or could dig up from the files. If Herr Durst’s field reports were in fact taken to Moscow, an agent who had worked with Muslims there or perhaps in Afghanistan might have sold them the information.”

“That is a rather tortuous route, is it not?” Carla said.

“It is no less so than the means through which I tracked it,” Durst said.

“The important thing is, the Staff isn’t here,” Kealey said.

He turned and looked out at the desert. The sun-bleached expanse suddenly seemed extremely large, incredibly hostile, and almost mocking in its easy, rolling tranquility.

The intelligence operative considered his options. Given how little they knew, there wasn’t a lot to think about. Instructing the others to return to the vehicle, Kealey went to the other side of the tank to call Harper. He checked his watch. It was the start of the business day in Virginia. Harper would be fresh. Kealey needed that now.

The TAC-SAT signal was strong.

“What’ve you got for me?” Harper asked, answering on the second beep.

Kealey told him.

“Well, that’s not what I wanted to hear,” Harper said.

It wasn’t a criticism, just fact. Kealey didn’t feel the need to apologize.

“Where do we go from here?” the deputy director asked.

“To Sinai,” Kealey said. “I don’t see what else to do. If they have the real Staff, we need to assess what that means on-site. Have you heard anything from your Egyptian friends?”

“Only that their man at Sinai has had some trouble with militia of some kind. They’re being very secretive.”

“Ego or payoffs?”

“Everything’s on the table,” Harper said, then asked Kealey to hold on.

The phone was frustratingly silent. For several long moments, Kealey wondered if the line had gone dead.

“Ryan, I just received a heads-up from the Double-H,” he said. “We’ve got a new situation at the mountain.”

T
he sound arrived moments after the blast. By the time Adjo looked up at the mountain, the fireball was almost fully formed. It was a snapshot that seemed absurd and terrifying: frightening in its size, and strange in the shape it held for a long moment, like a damp, glistening red pepper balanced on its stem.

The heat wave struck an instant later, an oily blast that warmed his cheeks and caused his mouth to open and literally baked his insides for a long, long moment. He felt the warmth at the top of his throat. It took several tries before he could swallow. After hovering high above the mountainside, unaffected by the wind, the pillar of fire poured down the side of the cliff as a sudden, continuous blaze. It reminded Adjo of a horse’s mane roused by the wind, long licks of fire striking out here and there in a continuous flow.

Gunfire popped around him as men who had weapons fired them into the air. Others prostrated themselves on the floor of the plain. They and others were chanting,
Musa, Musa, Musa!

It wasn’t the prophet but the drums of napalm Adjo had seen. That was why the men in the monastery hadn’t followed him onto the mountain. They were busy setting up the pyrotechnics.

Feigning excitement but watching the crowd for any hint of instigators, anyone paying more attention to rabblerousing than to the event itself—he saw none—Adjo made his way back toward the thickening edge of the mob nearest the mountain. He approached a thick-waisted, middle-aged man who seemed to be by himself. The man was firing a 9mm pistol into the air, nearly hitting himself in the head with his recoiling forearm. When the man had fired his last shot, he stopped and danced with joyous abandon from foot to foot while he loaded a fresh clip.

“May I?” Adjo asked with affected fervor, pointing to the sky and then the gun when it had been loaded.

The man smiled and handed him the Beretta like an offering, on two open hands. Adjo thanked him—and ran off. The man shouted and gave chase through the tightly packed mob, but he hesitated when Adjo—still elbowing forward—turned and angrily flashed the gun at him. Adjo continued to back away and a few seconds later was lost to his pursuer.

The foothills were still bathed in the warmth of the initial blast, while the heat from the ongoing fires descended in a greasy mist. Some of the pilgrims were moving back as the fine droplets seared their skin. No doubt the unusual nature of the fire would cause them to feel even more strongly that this was no ordinary fire but the fire of God, the one who had blocked the armies of the pharaoh. Perhaps that was the intent of the perpetrators. Napalm would not be commonly known by these people. Dynamite, yes. Gunpowder, absolutely. But not this incendiary compound.

Adjo turned his face down and the conflagration dropped pinpricks on the back of his neck. He moved as quickly as he could, pushing people aside so he could get to his destination. He suspected now that the reason the monk had spoken to him in the monastery was that he was probably not a monk at all but one of the people behind this operation, someone who wasn’t sure of the way clerics behaved there. More than likely he had signaled someone, either with a gesture or an electronic device, that he was being interrogated about the prophet by someone who didn’t look like a pilgrim.

What Adjo didn’t know was where the movement went from here. If they were following the Old Testament—and that was the only assumption he had to go on—they were going to be headed for a land flowing with milk and honey. Adjo had no way of knowing whether that was Israel, Palestine, Jordan, or somewhere else. Possibly somewhere else in Egypt. After all, they were already here. All but one of those was out of his jurisdiction. But he did know this much, from a purely strategic point of view: what was happening was well planned. And it couldn’t be a vague jihad that would require years or even months to grow. First, there were too many people here, ready to do whatever they were told. Second, at some point soon someone was going to go up the mountain and find the remains of the chemical accelerant, or prove that the prophet was being backed by someone other than God. Questions would be asked about the legitimacy of the leader and momentum would be lost.

Curious and fearful, Adjo finally managed to penetrate the crowd and headed for the monastery. The air around him, however tainted by the smoke, and the soil beneath him, however many foreign feet had crossed it, suddenly seemed very, very precious to him. He did not want anything to happen to his homeland.

The tours, of course, had not resumed. They were not likely to now. The MFO would be keeping everyone from the mountain while the Egyptian military was consulted. The army would study the situation by air before becoming involved in land reconnaissance; that was their way. In any case, they were not permitted to enter the monastery. It had the status of a foreign mission, answerable to the Church.

It would take at least three hours for the aerial survey to be completed. Lieutenant General Samra confirmed that when Adjo risked a quick phone call. Adjo gave him his impressions of the blast and its cause—confirming what Samra had already suspected—and told him he was going to the monastery, then hung up quickly. He wanted to have enough battery left to report whatever he found out in the monastery.

The gunfire had stopped and the chanting had begun in earnest. The people wanted to see their prophet. Adjo had heard of mass hypnosis, of group hysteria, and he was convinced that the local world had gone entirely mad. To believe that someone with drums of napalm and a magician’s wand was somehow endowed by God was a desire, not reality. Apparently—and tragically—that was enough to manipulate a horde of desperate souls to someone else’s ends.

The entire region stinks of that,
he thought bitterly. It was what had kept peace at arm’s length for millennia. Usually, his focus was too local to worry about the bigger picture. He was suddenly very sick of it and determined to stamp it out.

Starting here.

Despite his resolve, Adjo’s overtaxed limbs were beginning to stiffen and wobble. He was about a quarter of a kilometer from the monastery. Getting in wasn’t going to be easy, if it could be accomplished at all. He decided to take a short rest. He didn’t see any guards—perhaps they were all busy planning some other miracle? —but he had to assume they were there.

He sat on the gentle slope of the mountain, about fifty meters up. The wind was blowing away from him, carrying the stench of the napalm in the other direction. The breeze helped to refresh him. As he sat there, the phone vibrated again. It had to be important; Samra knew the situation with the battery.

“Where are you?” the lieutenant general asked.

“On the north side of the monastery, away from the crowd,” Adjo replied.

“Wait there. That American special-ops team with special knowledge of this situation is on its way.”

“What about our own military?” Adjo asked. “I assumed they would send aircraft—”

“That may not happen for quite a while,” Samra said. “They’re debating that at the Ministry. The MFO reported that there was celebratory gunfire.”

“There was, but not by soldiers—”

“With all the weapons out there, they don’t want to provoke a shoot-out—”

“Sir, we were
attacked
!”

“A holy site was scorched, and politically, that is a different thing,” Samra said, his tone gently reprimanding. “We have no evidence that it was an act of aggression or anything other than what it appears to be.”

“It comes in conjunction with my being fired at—”

“Something else we suspect but cannot prove,” Samra replied. “You know, we have seen the fire. It is being sent on cell phones. We obtained a copy.”

“They have very good reception out here,” Adjo remarked. Most tourist sites did, in case of illness or terrorist activity. The bastards obviously knew that, too.

“We are going to study the footage to try and get proof that supports your napalm theory,” Samra said.

“Sir, I saw the drums. I smelled the gasoline.”

“I cannot recommend sending in the army based on the say-so of one man, you know that,” Samra said. “Especially since the MFO has not been able to corroborate your claim.”

“They are too far from the site and the wind is blowing away from them,” Adjo said bitterly. But there was no point arguing and wasting precious phone time. “How will I know these Americans?”

“I will send them to your location,” Samra said. “Three men and a woman. Look for them sometime between sundown and dawn. I’m told they will have a halogen penlight. Look for the narrow, white beam.”

“That’s going to keep me pinned down when I could be investigating.”

“I don’t want you investigating anything else,” Samra said. “You were lucky to escape the first time. Stay where you are; that’s an order. Do you have sufficient supplies? Food? Water?”

“I have enough.”

“Very well. Call when they arrive,” Samra said. “They will have fresh equipment you can use.”

Adjo hung up. He still had some of the rations the MFO official had brought, and he ate those. Even his jaw hurt, from clenching it throughout the day.

He railed quietly against Samra’s order. The lieutenant general was under a lot of pressure and may have been saying that for the benefit of someone else in the room. Still, it was foolish. If special-ops reinforcements were going to be arriving—with “fresh equipment,” Samra had said, which suggested not just a phone but also weapons—Adjo should be able to tell them as much as possible about the foe they were facing and the terrain on which they would be meeting them. That did not mean sitting on the mountainside, looking down at the garden. It meant reconnoitering.

It also meant disobeying an order.

Maybe Samra is right,
he thought.
If something happens to me, the Americans will be lost.
And he would be more use to them if he were rested.

Eating his last two date bars, Adjo waited for the sun to pass to the other side of the mountain. He slept for a while, confident that the cooler breezes of the early evening would wake him in time to watch for his teammates.

A small thrill shot along his lower back as he considered the word. He had never been part of an international coalition. He could not even have imagined the circumstances under which such a thing would happen.

That was more of a miracle than anything he had seen so far.