The Inca Prophecy (46 page)

‘The route will take us south, to the Gulf of Aqaba,’ Rosenberg explained. ‘Once we reach the border with Jordan and Saudi Arabia, we will turn east and follow the border, just inside Jordanian airspace, but remember,’ the veteran of the 2007 attack on the Syrian al-Kibar reactor emphasised, ‘we maintain 150 feet above
the ground and we use Saudi call signs. All radio transmissions are to be in Arabic. The Jordanians have to be convinced we’re Saudi aircraft slightly off course. When we cross into Saudi airspace, we switch to Jordanian call signs. External fuel tanks are to be dumped here.’ Rosenberg pointed to an area in the northern Saudi desert. ‘The Americans are being briefed, and the Iraqi airspace will be open, allowing us a direct route to the Iranian border.’ Rosenberg turned back to the map. ‘The key targets are the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, and the heavy-water reactor at Arak, in this region here, 240 kilometres south of Tehran.’

The hologram changed from the briefing room to the deserts of central Iran. Israeli jets screamed towards the heavy-water reactor, metres above the sand. Suddenly, afterburner alight, the lead F-16 climbed rapidly, rolled and dived. At just 3500 feet, the pilot released a 2000-pound bomb. The dome of the reactor exploded in a massive ball of flame and smoke, releasing deadly radioactive particles that rose into the air, drifting north towards Tehran. More bombs hit the laboratories and the heavy-water plant.

The explosions faded, and the stone parapets of the Damascus Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem came into view. A large crowd of angry Palestinians were milling around the gate. A heavy Israeli security force, armed with rubber bullets, tear gas and foul-smelling water cannons, was preventing the Arabs from gaining access to the al-Aqsa Mosque and Friday prayers.

Suicide bomber Ahmed Shahadi was wearing a nondescript backpack. He grasped the nuclear detonator in his pocket and worked his way towards the police barricade. The Palestinians were being stopped, but the Jews were allowed through on their
way to prayers at the Western Wall. A wizened Arab in a black and white
keffiyeh
was shouting abuse at the guards. Shahadi knew he was already more than close enough to destroy the remains of the second temple and the Dome of the Rock. He approached the barricade and a young Israeli soldier armed with a Tavor assault rifle stepped forward.

‘
Allahu Akbar
. This is for little Rashida!’ Ahmed yelled and he pressed the trigger, closing the detonator circuit. In a blinding white flash, the nuclear bomb reached a temperature of 50 million degrees, five times hotter than the surface of the sun. The Damascus Gate and the ancient walls of Jerusalem, which had withstood centuries of warfare and bombardment, were vaporised instantly. A massive plume of radioactive debris rose thousands of metres into the air, the cloud ballooning into an ever-expanding mushroom of death. The white heat was followed by a widening shockwave. The winds reached 600 kilometres an hour, and the rolling, thunderous blast destroyed everything in its path. The Old City of Jerusalem was wiped from history: the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque obliterated, the souks and alleys around them destroyed. Further out, the bodies of thousands of Jews, Christians and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, tourists and locals, lay where they’d been at the moment of the firestorm, the textures of their clothing seared on to their charred skin. Thousands more, still alive but horribly burned, screamed in agony. Unseen neutrons, alpha and gamma rays and electrons pulsed in all directions at nearly the speed of light. Many thousands of people would not survive the deadly radiation, and hundreds of thousands more would succumb to slow, agonising deaths from cancer.

The hologram faded and was replaced by another. A light plane had entered restricted airspace over New York and air traffic control was frantically trying to reach the pilot.

‘Beechcraft November one eight zero nine Victor, you are in restricted airspace. I repeat, you are in restricted airspace. Turn right heading 270. I repeat, turn right, heading 270, maintain 2000 feet.’ The desperate calls from air traffic control went unheeded and above the Beechcraft at flight level 150, a combat air patrol of two F-15 Eagles from the Massachusetts Air National Guard 102nd Fighter Wing rolled into an intercept dive.

The lead F-15 Eagle pilot held the target on his heads-up display, but before the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile could find its mark, New York City was hit by a cataclysmic nuclear explosion. The plutonium bomb vaporised the memorial at Ground Zero, and amongst the blazing ruins of Manhattan, the bodies of tens of thousands of office workers were burned beyond recognition.

Across the Atlantic, another blinding flash appeared between Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, boiling the River Thames. The hologram changed to reveal the smoking, twisted, mangled steel of what had once been the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A pall of radioactive smoke drifted over the crater where the Opera House had stood.

A shocked President Ahmadinejad appeared on Al Jazeera, condemning the Israeli bombings, and denying any knowledge of the seemingly coordinated nuclear bombing of Western cities. For once, he was telling the truth. General Shakiba and the Yawm al-Qiyamah Jihad had seized control, condemning Western civilisation to destruction. President Ahmadinejad pleaded for a
ceasefire, but it was too late.

As its solid-fuel rocket motor belched smoke and flames, a gleaming white and blue missile lifted from its silo at the Israeli missile base at Palmachim, just to the south of Tel Aviv. The 15-metre-long, 30-tonne missile gathered speed and thundered into the clear Mediterranean sky, leaving a long trail of white smoke. Another missile followed the first, and then another and another, the onboard computers programmed to strike Tehran, Qom, Esfahan, Shiraz and a dozen other Iranian cities.

The hologram switched to an image of General Shakiba, who was in his command bunker in a remote mountain range in the north of Iran. Shakiba watched the satellite photographs streaming into his command bunker with a growing fury. Tehran was a smoking ruin, the Majlis and the Ayatollah Khomeini Mosque reduced to smoking radioactive craters. Tens of thousands of bodies lay buried amongst the twisted, shattered rubble that was once a city. Hundreds of thousands more lay dying from shocking burns, with no one to treat them.

‘The West is trying to destroy Islam! Activate Operation Badr!’ Shakiba ordered, his dark eyes blazing with fury. Badr had been one of Muhammad’s most significant battles against the pagan forces of Mecca, signalling to the world that a Muslim power had risen in Arabia.

Hydraulic rams opened the heavy concrete roofs on missile silos buried deep in the Zagros and Alborz mountains, revealing the deadly nose cones of the Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. The missiles were strategically deployed hundreds of kilometres apart, each allotted a different target. Dense clouds of flames and exhaust poured
from the vents in the silos in the mountains to the north of Shahrak-e-Moallem, Chashmidar, and a dozen other covert launch sites. The giant missiles thundered unerringly above the carnage, powering out of the earth’s atmosphere at over 5000 kilometres an hour, some headed for Tel Aviv and other Israeli bases, while others headed for American bases in the Middle East, which were vital to the refuelling of the superpower’s warships and aircraft. The huge 5th Fleet Base in Bahrain erupted in a fireball, the twisted wreckage of ships still at their moorings reminiscent of Pearl Harbour. Three supertankers were ablaze in the Straits of Hormuz, closing the choke point and bringing oil supplies to a halt.

The hologram changed, returning to the White House, and a grim-faced President McGovern chairing the National Security Council. The vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, secretary of energy and the chairman of the joint chiefs were sitting in the very room in which the prophecy was unfolding. Advisors filled the chairs lining the walls, and video screens beamed live footage of the growing worldwide holocaust.

‘We have to respond, Mr President!’ the chairman of the joint chiefs thundered. ‘This is a declaration of war!’

‘The President of Russia is on the secure line, Mr President,’ the chief of staff announced. McGovern took the call.

‘We must stay out of this, Mr President,’ the President of Russia warned in a low, guttural accent. ‘Israel, and Israel alone, is responsible.’

‘We have no quarrel with Russia,’ the President replied, ‘but we can’t stand by while our own people are being slaughtered.’

‘I am warning you, Mr President, don’t escalate this any further.’

McGovern put down the phone. His jaw set, he briefed the room on Russia’s position.

‘That’s just a bluff, Mr President,’ the chairman of the joint chiefs barked. ‘The Russians won’t risk retaliation. We need to remove Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Syria from the nuclear equation!’

The humming of high-voltage electricity between the skulls rose to a crescendo as Minuteman intercontinental missiles, carrying their deadly payload of multiple nuclear warheads, roared out of their silos at the Vandenberg Air Force base on the Californian coast.

One after another, the big swing-wing B1-B Lancer strategic nuclear bombers rumbled down the runways at Ellsworth Air Base in South Dakota and Dyess Air Base in Texas, bound for Iran. The nuclear submarines USS
Maryland
,
Nevada
and
West Virginia
launched their Trident II nuclear missiles, and the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and the Pacific Ocean boiled as the missiles thundered from the depths into the skies above.

Russian R-36 ballistic missiles from silos near Nalobikha in southern Russia soared into the same skies, as did missiles from Nizh-Tagil in the Urals, and the hologram faded …

The images of total destruction were replaced by one of an icy nuclear winter settling over the planet. Hundreds of millions lay dead, and hundreds of millions more were dying. Huge fires in the cities had lifted millions of cubic metres of smoke into the troposphere, ten kilometres above the earth, where it was heated by the sun, sending it into the stratosphere where it would remain, blocking out the sun for years and sending temperatures on the earth to below zero. Millions of tonnes of soot absorbed solar radiation,
heating the surrounding gases and breaking down the stratospheric ozone layer. An ozone hole the size of India had opened, allowing deadly ultraviolet radiation to saturate the planet. The earth’s once warm, grain-growing plains had been reduced to wastelands, and the food bowls of the world lay devastated. The images of people in their hundreds of millions dying of starvation faded from view, and the flashing blue bolts of electricity connecting the crystal skulls slowly subsided. A hollow emptiness enveloped the situation room.

For a long while, no one spoke, but the silence was eventually broken by Carlos Huayta.

‘The dangerous course of history you are charting will take you over the cliff and into the abyss. Just as the Inca accurately forecast their own destruction at the hands of the Spanish, the skulls have forecast your own civilisation’s destruction. Nuclear brinkmanship is the forerunner.’

The old shaman paused to let his words take effect.

‘But there is another way,’ he said, ‘and the key lies in the very first words of the Inca prophecy: “When the Eagle of the North and the Condor of the South fly together, the Earth will awaken. The Eagle of the North is the modern, developed world,”’ Huayta explained. ‘The powerful countries of the world have great material wealth, but many of your people are spiritually and culturally impoverished. The Condor of the South represents the peoples who remain close to the earth. They possess the wisdom that comes from being connected with the natural world. The Eagle of the North will never be free if it does not fly with the condor of the south. If we link them, a great harmony will result.

‘I am from the Q’ero people, the last of the Inca who moved to
high altitudes to escape the Spanish conquistadors. For 500 years we have preserved this prophecy. Now we know the
pachacuti
, the great change, is upon us. The time has come to set things right.’

Huayta looked around the table. ‘The choice is yours, my friends.’

Acknowledgements

In July 2010, I had just descended the torturous switchback road carved out of the mountainside below Machu Picchu and was wandering the steep cobbled streets of Aguas Calientes. Browsing in a local bookshop, I came across
Machu Picchu Forever, City of Pilgrims
, a fascinating book by Mallku Aribalo. I contacted Mallku, who kindly agreed to see me in Cusco at very short notice. In two hours we could only scratch the surface, but I was grateful for his insights into the shamanic path and the extraordinary depths of the ancient Inca culture. Despite some prophecies heralding the end of the world in December 2012, Mallku does not agree. Rather, he sees this as a time of
pachacuti
, or great change –
pacha
meaning earth or time, and
cuti
meaning to set things right.

The Inca prophecy comes from the Q’ero people. For 500 years, the Q’ero, the last of the Inca, remained hidden high in the Andes. But in 1949, anthropologist Oscar Nunez del Prado was attending the Paucartambo festival when he encountered two Indians who spoke Quechua, the ancient language of the Inca; and the existence of the Q’ero was unmasked. Like Mallku, the Q’ero believe the time of great change is upon us, when the Eagle of the North (the West) and the Condor of the South (the native peoples, who are in tune with
pachamama
, or Mother Earth) will once again fly together.
This will be a spiritual awakening, an awareness of the rhythms of the planet. But in my view, unless we change course, we will miss this last opportunity.

We have already come to the brink of nuclear destruction on no fewer than five occasions, yet still we contemplate an attack on Iran. Regardless of the rare planetary alignment in December 2012, we have already sown the seeds of our own destruction, and if we continue on this path, we won’t need any help from the elements. Far-fetched? Chillingly, it is not.