Part 29 (1/2)

Fouad had been ten years old when she had died. With his mother's memory had pa.s.sed Fouad's already shaky belief in her stories. He had kept only the core-G.o.d and prayer. No fairy tales.

He pushed back against Harris under the thermal blanket. Harris moaned again, not very loudly. When awake, Harris was almost out of his mind with the dull throbbing pain of his arm and his ribs. The pills did not seem to do be doing much good.

Fouad saw the morning and stood beside the boulder, leaning against it. There were now distant figures on the plain, wandering between the whirlwinds like ants between huge silken scarves.

In the cold their water was holding up and they had plenty of food but that would not matter if the figures on the plain found them. In the moonlight two men had pa.s.sed by just fifty or sixty meters away, no doubt following a trail from the wreckage of the Superhawk. There had been the shuffling of lightly shod feet and muttered conversations in Farsi.

So now Fouad did not dare stand up and pray. Under his breath, he said, 'Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.' But prayer was incomplete without the motions so he stopped and silently promised that these prayers would be made up for, all of them, when there was a place and a time. G.o.d was understanding and all-forgiving.

Fouad's father had been a severe and serious man and no doubt he had partic.i.p.ated in many treacheries, and perhaps even now was involved in such. But his father had called prayer a blessing in life beyond measure, the moment when all else faded and the mind was quiet and in touch with the One that is One. In their years in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, they had gone to mosque and prayed together daily until Fouad was sent away to school in Maryland.

There had been a few months in his late adolescence when Fouad had stopped praying, but he had soon found he missed the blessing of opening his heart.

Had they informed his father he was missing?

Harris lay quietly. Fouad gently lifted the blanket to avoid pulling it off his companion as he rolled over, and then realized that Harris was alert. His face was pink with fever.

'Do you hear that?' Harris whispered. At first Fouad heard just the wind. Then a distant roaring.

'Activate the C-SARB,' Harris said.

Fouad looked around to make sure they were not about to be set upon by trackers. The figures on the plain were heading for another outcrop a few kilometers west. He switched on the beacon.

'Look for it,' Harris said. 'It's going to be a big one. They'll be doing, I don't know, atmosphere recon, taking samples to track fallout. A big chopper or an airplane, accompanied by Warthogs, maybe F-18s, F-22s. I don't think they'll come out here just for us.'

'Shh,' Fouad said. 'Of course they will extract us. You are valuable. And the specimens.'

'Who the f.u.c.k cares about some dead Kurds?' Harris said. 'They'll come to track the radiation out of Iran.'

Fouad turned, looked up, and saw the aircraft and it was as Harris had suggested-a very big helicopter and heavily armed. It was coming from the west and dipped briefly and arrogantly over the few figures on the plain but did not fire upon them. Then it sped toward the hills. He could not see or hear other aircraft. He crept to the edge of their rocky promontory, leaving Harris in the shade of the large boulder. This was the most dangerous time of all, Fouad knew. He left the C-SARB on but crept low in case pickets had been stationed nearby waiting for them to be rescued.

Watching the helicopter, still kilometers off, Fouad remembered more of his mother's story.

'For the great King of the Abbasids had worries of this boy, and his powers, and sent soldiers to search for him high and low, and found him neither in the Earth nor in the cities nor in the mountains. The doves hid him from sight, the Jinn made him invisible, and sometimes even his father the eleventh Imam, peace be upon him and his progeny, could not find him when he was at play...'

The C-SARB would guide the helicopter. Up until the last minute, he would try to make himself as invisible as that fairy-tale boy.

Then he heard a sound like a small animal being stepped on. Fouad glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see a bird of prey with something in its talons-an irrational hope. A piece of light fabric bobbed above the thrusting spine of rock that defined their promontory, within a few meters of the large boulder. Fouad crept along the gravel between the rocks, pistol in hand. He had studied the area that morning, looking for a place to pray, and remembered ways where he could stay hidden. He could not use the pistol unless he absolutely had to, it would attract attention. So he drew the knife from its sheath around his calf.

A tall, bony, bearded man in ragged desert camouflage stood up from a crouch. He had wrapped a dirty length of cloth around his head and it trailed down the back of his neck. His expression was of horrid satisfaction like a butcher who enjoys his work. He lifted Harris's severed head and began to bob up and down, a little dance of triumph and pride. He sang a quiet song in Farsi, too low for Fouad to understand.

His back was to Fouad.

Fouad ran from his cover and grabbed the man's knife hand from the lower wrist and twisted his hand and arm around and quickly had him back and down as he had been taught. The man's long serrated blade flew off to one side. So surprised, the man made not even the sound that Harris had made. He saw Fouad's face and seemed to think that this was a joking friend, wrestling with a fellow insurgent. And indeed Fouad was smiling rea.s.surance. He covered the man's mouth with one hand and with the other pushed his blade just behind the man's prominent Adam's apple, twisted it sideways, and pulled up, then twisted again. The man quivered like a lamb, staring up in silent dismay. His blood flowed in a controlled stream, copious but not spraying or spurting.

Slowly the dying man's face grew sleepy and calm. His quivering subsided to slack twitches.

Fouad felt nothing except a formless loathing at something so stupid, so vicious, like an idiot who tortures kittens or birds. His father had cared little for the jihadists or those in the umma umma who supported them. 'They will get us all killed,' his father had growled over the dinner table after 9-11. 'They care nothing for Islam, nothing for Allah. They are like jackals chewing on the foot of a tiger.' who supported them. 'They will get us all killed,' his father had growled over the dinner table after 9-11. 'They care nothing for Islam, nothing for Allah. They are like jackals chewing on the foot of a tiger.'

Now Fouad understood. He withdrew his knife. The man who had grinned and danced in joy at his work now appeared sated, with the expression that comes of having no blood in one's brain. His eyes sank back. Harris's head had rolled a couple of meters and lay face down, awful.

A few minutes later, as the helicopter fanned a great wind, Fouad let go of his kill and stumbled across the rocks to rearrange Harris. He waved his hands and began to weep.

There was nothing. Even as the huge machine set down, he was utterly and forever alone. He could not visualize his mother's face. G.o.d was not with him, and would never be again.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE.

Silesia, Ohio.

Sam slid the wand over the electrical contacts.

The pillar of fire rose in the early morning, brief and smoky. Twenty starbursts bloomed over the small park at an alt.i.tude of just over two thousand feet. They formed a curve with the highest end in the east and the lowest pointing north.

Somehow, given the silence and the stillness after the loud pops, Sam did not think there would be much fuss. And certainly nothing to attract attention to him. Doubtless only a few people saw the flashes of light before the dawn and wondered. Police might be contacted. There might be a report filed. A cruiser might be dispatched to search for anything suspicious.

Sam closed the lid on the trailer, put on his filter mask, cinched it tight, and got behind the wheel of the Dodge. He drove into the wind for a few minutes, then circled around, caught the freeway, and headed east.

He clamped his jaw and imagined the descending ragged plume of invisible dust, so fine, drifting and falling, rising again, spreading and dropping for miles; a few would hear the rattle of small gla.s.s beads on their roofs.

For all the angry people, for the righteous, for the zealots and the monsters: a small gift. A gift of the small.

So simple.

It had worked.

part three

MEMORY.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX.

Trenton, NJ October.

William Griffin stood in the parking garage at the center of six growing piles of sorted trash and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He could not reach under his mask to wipe his nose, which was running continuously. No mask and no amount of cream could cover up the stench. The twelvestory building overhead contained three restaurants and fiftytwo businesses that produced at least four tons of trash each day, sent down three chutes to dumpsters rotated out and stored behind a chain link enclosure to be picked up once every two days. This was the end of the second day and the dumpsters had all been full. And somewhere in the piles, they might find a paper coffee cup, chewed chicken bones, a receipt, a photo, a stack of paper inadvertently left unshredded, in close archaeological a.s.sociation with each other, with just the right set of DNA or fingerprints to connect four Thai sc.u.mbags currently in the custody of Border Security to trafficking in underage prost.i.tutes.

Ten-year-olds.

Nine-year-olds.

Five-year-olds.