The shooting continued for about fifteen seconds, then abruptly ceased. Shuffling closer to the doorframe, Tamara peeked around its edge and spotted two figures behind the overturned Land Cruiser. A soldier with flaming-red hair aimed his rifle at the police station, and a big, ugly lummox pointed his handgun in the same direction. Tamara recognized them—Jordan and Lukas, two of her least favorite True Believers. They were former Delta Force commandos who’d been recruited to the cause by Brother Cyrus and General McNair, and both were excellent marksmen. Tamara quickly withdrew into the station.
Michael tugged on her sleeve. He looked scared but not panicky, which was damn good under the circumstances. “Are they Brother Cyrus’s soldiers?”
She nodded. “I got some of them, but two are still standing.”
She heard a gunshot, but no bullet hit the police station. Then she heard another shot, followed by the sound of a distant ricochet. Tamara peeked around the doorframe again and saw Lukas aiming his pistol at her Land Cruiser. One of its front tires was already flat. Lukas fired again and burst the other front tire. He’d obviously realized by now that she and Michael weren’t in the car, but he was shooting at it anyway to eliminate their means of escape. Feeling a surge of anger, Tamara started to aim her Makarov at him, but as she pointed the gun through the doorway a bullet from Jordan’s M-16 whistled past her right ear.
“Goddamn it!” she screamed, falling backward on her ass. “I can’t get a shot! That redheaded asshole is covering the door!”
Michael bit his lower lip and stared at the floor. For a moment Tamara thought he was going to start crying. Then he pointed to the back of the police station. Past the desks and the jail cell and the Turkmen flag was another door, the station’s back door. “We can go out that way,” he said. “And ride the motorcycle that’s parked behind the building. The Ural, the one with the sidecar.”
Shit, Tamara thought, why didn’t she think of that? She felt a burst of relief so strong she laughed out loud. But then she pictured the area behind the police station and shook her head. The shacks behind the station were too tightly clustered. She knew she couldn’t maneuver the Ural motorcycle between them. She’d have to go around the shacks, and that meant they’d be exposed. They’d have to ride across Jordan’s line of fire, less than a hundred feet from his position. The bastard could easily pick them off.
Unless he was distracted by something else. As Tamara crouched on the cement floor of the police station, a plan began to form in her mind. It wasn’t a perfect plan. But in combat, there was no such thing as perfect.
She gazed at Michael. She wanted to grab his shoulders and look him in the eye, but she knew it would upset him. Instead she spoke softly and slowly. “Michael, how much do you know about the Ural? You said your mom showed you how to start the engine, right?”
He nodded. “Yes, and how to work the controls. The throttle and the brake are on the right handle, and the clutch is on the left. The gears—”
“Do you think you can ride it by yourself?”
He nodded again, smiling. “Yes, I can ride it. Monique Reynolds said the sidecar gives the motorcycle more stability. She was going to let me drive it on the beach, but then David Swift came running toward us and said it wasn’t safe to—”
“Okay, Michael, listen up. I want you to go out the back door and get on the Ural and start it up. Then turn the bike to the south and ride as fast as you can. You got that?”
“And you’re going to sit in the sidecar?”
Tamara shook her head. “No, I’m going to stay here. Cyrus’s soldiers will try to shoot you while you’re riding away. But I’m going to shoot them first. I’ll run out the door and fire so many bullets at them that they won’t be able to aim at you.”
“Do you want me to come back here later? To pick you up?”
“No, I want you to keep going. Ride south until you come to another village. Then find a telephone and call David Swift. Tell him what Brother Cyrus is planning to do. You know David Swift’s phone number, right?”
He nodded a third time. “Yes, it’s 212-555-3988.”
Tamara smiled. She wanted so much to hug the boy, but she kept her hands to herself. Her stomach churned as she looked at Michael, knowing she would never see him again. But it was the only way. She had to save him. “Okay, go!” she said, pointing at the station’s back door. “Don’t forget what I told you!”
Obediently, he turned around and dashed across the room. While he opened the back door and ran outside, Tamara peeked around the frame of the front doorway again. The two gray Land Cruisers glared in the sunlight, the farther one kneeling on its flat tires and the closer one lying on its back like a beetle. Lukas and Jordan crouched behind the overturned car, looking for signs of movement. Beyond them, the sand dunes stretched to the horizon.
A moment later, Tamara heard the rumble of the Ural’s engine. The True Believers heard it, too. Jordan lifted his head from his rifle’s scope and Lukas turned toward the noise. Tamara waited until the engine’s rumble rose in pitch and volume, indicating that Michael had started his dash to the south. She saw Jordan swing his M-16 away from her, aiming it in a new direction. Then Tamara charged out of the doorway, screaming at the top of her lungs and firing the Makarov at the soldiers.
Jordan’s head swiveled and his eyes widened and he started to point his rifle at her, but she shot him in the throat before he could pull the trigger. Then she aimed her gun at Lukas, but he ducked behind the Land Cruiser and her shot passed over his shoulder. Tamara charged forward and fired at him again, trying to get between Lukas and the motorcycle. If she could find some cover behind a sand dune, she could pin him down and stop him from taking a shot at Michael. From the corner of her eye she saw the boy on the Ural, barreling over the sand about a hundred feet away.
But then Lukas did something she hadn’t expected: he came around the back of the overturned car and shot her from behind. Tamara felt a jolt between her shoulder blades and another in the small of her back. The bullets pushed her forward and made her drop her pistol, but she felt no pain at first. She even managed to take a few more steps before falling. As she tipped forward she turned her head, hoping to see Michael again, but instead she saw Lukas kneeling on the lip of a dune and pointing his handgun at the motorcycle. Then the pain tore into her, ripping through her whole body, because she knew Michael wouldn’t make it. Lukas would shoot him and he would die in agony. And it was her fault.
She landed facedown, splashing into the sand. More pain shot through her torso and her vision blurred. She heard more gunshots, a great many gunshots, but she didn’t hear what she expected next, the sound of the motorcycle crashing. With great difficulty she lifted her head and tried to focus.
The gunshots were coming from the Ural. Michael had taken his M-9 out of his pants while riding the motorcycle and fired at Lukas. The big, ugly True Believer lay behind the dune now, clutching his right arm. Tamara felt a bolt of joy that was even more intense than her pain. Michael fired three more bullets that flew over Lukas’s head. Then she heard nothing but the blessed roar of the Ural’s engine, which grew steadily fainter as the boy sped away.
Lukas staggered to his feet. He found his pistol and tried to fire it at Michael with his left hand, but the motorcycle was out of range now. Tamara lowered her forehead to the sand and whispered, “Thank you.” Then she began creeping toward the upside-down Land Cruiser. She was dying, but there was one more thing she could do. She couldn’t move her legs, so she clawed the ground with both hands and dragged the rest of her body forward, leaving a trail of thickened, reddish sand behind her.
She didn’t stop until she reached Jordan’s body. There was a bloody hole in his neck, just above the collar of his flak jacket. Tamara used the last of her strength to fling herself on top of the corpse. She felt unbearably dizzy and was desperate to close her eyes. But she bit her tongue to stay conscious and hung on to the dead soldier, her hands groping.
Then she heard Lukas’s voice above her. “You stupid bitch!” he yelled. “You think you can stop us?”
Before she could reply, he stomped on her back. The heel of his boot smashed into her ribs. Then he grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled back her head. “Answer me, bitch! You think you can stop us?”
“No,” she gasped. “I can’t. But Michael will.”
“No, he fucking won’t!” he screamed into her ear. “I’m gonna get on the radio and report his position to the other units. And then we’ll have twenty soldiers coming at him from all sides. So you haven’t accomplished a fucking thing. You’ve just prolonged his suffering! And now you’re gonna suffer, too!”
He grasped her shoulder and flipped her onto her back. But she’d already removed one of the M67 grenades from the pouch in Jordan’s flak jacket. While Lukas had been screaming at her, she’d pulled the safety clip and the pin and released the lever.
Tamara clasped her hands around the grenade, hiding it from view. Lukas stared at her, puzzled, as the four-second fuse burned down between her palms. She didn’t know if she would ever see the Kingdom of Heaven, but that didn’t matter now. She smiled at Lukas. “You’re wrong,” she whispered. “Our suffering is over.”
27
AS NIGHT FELL ON THE EASTERN SHORE OF THE CASPIAN SEA, OLAM’S
assault team departed from the fishing trawler in three Zodiacs. Each of the inflatable boats held eight commandos and a sixty-horsepower outboard, equipped with heavy-duty mufflers to minimize the engine noise. The Zodiacs cruised in a long line, spaced about a hundred yards apart. Olam rode in the first boat with David, Monique, and Lucille. They wore black pants and black shirts, and their faces and necks and hands were smeared with black paint. Most of the
kippot srugot
in the Zodiacs carried Galil rifles, the standard infantry weapon of the IDF, but Olam had slung an M24 sniper rifle over his shoulder. Lucille carried her Glock and wore a black wool cap over her mass of platinum hair. David and Monique carried Desert Eagle pistols that Olam had given them. David’s gun, tucked in a shoulder holster, pressed against his ribs, impossible to ignore.
They were approaching the strait that led to the Kara-Bogaz, a shallow gulf of the Caspian. A bridge ran over the strait, but luckily it wasn’t carrying any traffic at the moment. This stretch of the Turkmen coastline was deserted. Nevertheless, the commandos were silent as they drifted under the causeway, letting the current sweep them past the concrete pylons. Within twenty minutes they’d passed through the strait and into the vast darkness of the Kara-Bogaz. The gulf stretched a hundred miles inland but was only a few yards deep. Because they were now very far from the nearest habitation, they could rev up the outboards. Soon they were heading full speed toward their landing point, which was directly north of their ultimate objective, the Turkmen military depot.
Olam sat between David and Monique, his muscled torso straining against the rubber side of the Zodiac. He nudged David with his elbow. “What do you think?” he said, gesturing at the blackness all around them. “It’s like the universe before the Creation, eh?
‘And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’
And we are like the spirit of God, yes? Moving upon the face of the waters?”
David frowned. He wished he was sitting next to Monique. After they’d made love in the trawler’s cabin, she’d fallen into her somber mood again. They’d hardly talked at all as they’d changed into their black clothes and smeared paint on their faces. Now David tried to look past Olam and catch Monique’s eye, but it was so dark he could see only her profile. He shook his head and turned back to Olam. “We’re not the spirit of God,” he said.
“What’s wrong, my friend? Are you nervous? I told you, you shouldn’t worry. We will destroy the X-ray laser before the
Qliphoth
can use it. You will bring us victory because you’re the instrument of—”
“Yes, you told me, the instrument of
Keter,
the first step in the enumeration of the universe, whatever that means.”
Olam seemed amused. He cocked his head and pointed at David. “You don’t like to talk about God, do you? You’d prefer to avoid it, eh? You’d rather talk about forces and particles and dimensions.”
“No, that’s not it. I just don’t like it when people think they’re acting on God’s behalf. Acting as if God told them what to do, and now they think it’s their job to tell everyone else. And that’s the whole history of religion, pretty much.”
Olam laughed, a low rumble in his chest. “For a historian, you’re playing very loose with the facts. Not every religion is so demanding. In my version of Judaism, God doesn’t give orders. He simply exists. He’s a presence in us and in everything around us.” He gestured at the darkness again, raising his right hand and tracing a circle with his finger.
David stared at the surrounding waters, looking past the silhouettes of the commandos sitting on the other side of the boat. He turned toward Monique again, just to reassure himself that she was still there, but Olam’s broad shoulders blocked her from view. The man’s mysticism was starting to annoy him. “If it’s just a presence, why not call it ‘reality’? Why create this concept of God at all?”
“Perhaps I’m not explaining so well. The universe is information, yes? I think we can agree on that. And God is the idea that connects the information. The program that brings everything together.”
“But why call it God? When you use that name, you’re implying the presence of a heavenly father figure, some benevolent old man who watches over the universe and cares about us. And that kind of God doesn’t exist.”
“Are you sure?” He leaned a little closer to David. His body odor mixed with the brackish scent of the gulf. “What do you think protects us from chaos? If there were no program, the universe would be a mishmash. Everything would happen at once and nothing would make sense. But the program chooses one thing out of all the quantum possibilities and says, ‘So be it!’ And though the choice might seem random to us, it is anything but. You, of all people, should remember what Einstein said: God doesn’t play dice with the universe. The program coordinates everything.”