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Serials - parts and parts.

Countdown to Armageddon, Episode Two

Written by Edward M. Lerner

Illustrated by Dean Spencer

NEAR METZ, 725

A Brobdingnagian roar engulfed the thick woods. Black clouds of dust swirled and swept dervishlike across the ruined landscape. Rubble bounced and crashed down the steep slopes. Forest animals fled, predators and prey side by side, in single-minded terror.

Amid the devastation, a lone man fought to keep his balance. He failed. Like the rocks and broken trees around him, he slid, willy-nilly, down the hillside.

It was a wild ride, through which he prayed fervently. Random projectiles battered and bruised him. Time and again, he narrowly escaped careening boulders and toppling trees.

A great stone outcropping snagged him, knocking the wind from him. Grimacing in pain, several ribs clearly cracked, he crawled around the boulder to huddle beneath its broad overhang.

A large box, its sides battered and scarred, slid past. The box hesitated for a moment, until the shaking ground started it back on its way downhill. The container vanished into the thick dust.

Dust clouds covered the sun. What little light penetrated the haze was blood red. Gradually, the din lessened. The rocks stopped falling. Animals howled, lost in the otherworldly gloom. Randomly, in tremendous spasms, the ground continued to shudder.

Slowly, favoring his cracked ribs, the man climbed to his feet. He freed a sturdy branch from the rubble; using it as a cane, he carefully made his way downhill. He stumbled frequently, for what little illumination the sun still cast was shrouded by airborne dust.

Never had he beheld such catastrophe. The earth moaned beneath his feet. From every direction came the delicate slithering of loose soil and untethered pebbles seeking downward for a new equilibrium. As though proud heaven felt itself challenged by the convulsions below, a great stroke of lightning split the sky. Seconds later, an enormous peal of thunder roiled the ground-hugging dust clouds.

Through chaos and ruin, the man worked down the slope. He listened, carefully, past the whistle of the wind, the subsiding of the soil, and the whimpers of injured animals. Finally, faintly, he sensed an ethereal music.

The melody called to him. Casting aside his improvised cane, he broke into a fast stumble, wincing at the pain in his side but unable to hold back. The music poured forth from places unseen, louder and louder. He stopped when it seemed to emanate from the rubble beneath his feet. Agitatedly he dug, flinging chunks of stone and handfuls of loose dirt in all directions. The music swelled louder and louder.

His hand slapped smooth paneling; something boomed hollowly from the blow. The contact only increased his excitement. Harmonies swelling all about him, he feverishly swept away the last of the debris. There! Handles! He unlocked the cabinet with a key from his pocket and twisted the levers madly.

Battered hinges squealed in protest, but they could not resist the man’s frenzied tug. Then, as the doors flew open, the music reached a crescendo: the triumphant choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Abdul Faisel, eyes brimming with tears, listened to the only MP3 player within twelve centuries. When the last cadence had faded into the swiftly falling night, he would begin moving the generally intact artifacts from the battered cabinet into a nearby cave. There he would spread his prayer rug and give proper thanks for a safe journey.

Allah akbar. God is great.

****

Faisel had first explored the cave in 1993. Carrying only a liter of bottled water on a sling, the hike from the institute grounds had been pleasant. The same trip today, with a full backpack and cracked ribs, through toppled and entangled trees, was much harder.

It took seven trips to transfer everything from the storage cabinet to safety. Dragging the empty, but still-heavy and awkward cabinet for almost a kilometer, Faisel nearly wished he had brought Ali the van driver at gunpoint. He would bring a wagon and muscular staff when he eventually returned. It was just one more specific for an already long and detailed plan.

Now—with a campfire crackling before him, his stomach full of canned beef stew, and his boots off—Faisel indulged in self-congratulation. He had done it! He, bomb, and supplies were exactly when he meant them to be.

Hezbollah had merely lent him their plutonium, expecting an atomic bomb back in return. For his part, he had promised to the sheiks a sword for Allah unlike any that had ever before been wielded. It was the details about which he had been less than forthcoming; the sheiks cooperatively mistook his vague, apocalyptic vision for zealous hyperbole. His was the most radical solution of all, and Hezbollah could be proud of its contributions—although of course they would never know.

Exhaustion took its toll. Staring at the flickering flames, he fell into a near-hypnotic trance. The fire burned down. Embers glimmered, reminiscent of red symbols that had so recently flashed before him: 14, 13, 12. . .

NEAR METZ, 2004

Abdul Faisel was shut inside the massive enclosure, the initiation sequencer counting the final seconds, when someone rapped firmly upon the locked laboratory doors. The rhythm changed quickly to an insistent pounding. The rising hum of his apparatus muffled the voice.

“Wait!” The doors crashed open, admitting the stocky director of the institute. It could not have been anyone else. Only Mlle. Hubert could override his reprogramming of the laboratory lock. Her appearance at this moment went beyond logical prediction to prescience: At some subconscious level, Abdul had always known he would face her before leaving. He would have to pay the piper.

Good Catholic though she was, Mlle. Hubert—Suzanne—had always treated him, the son of a Muslim fisherman, with respect: as a talented protégé, at first; then as an equal, a collaborator; finally, almost as a son. She had helped him through the grief of the massacre. Now she stood outside of the apparatus, peering through the tightly wound coils at him. “Wait, Abdul. Whatever you’re doing, whatever your reason for tapping the storage ring, it is unauthorized. And dangerous, it must be dangerous, or you would not be experimenting on yourself.” She said more, but the roaring hum of the coils drowned out most of her words.

In seconds, the equipment would operate; Mlle. Hubert would die. If all went well, untold millions would die—so why did one old woman’s death matter? Why? Because she symbolized all the innocents, all the nonpoliticals, all those who deserved better than they would get. His hands shook with the desire to hit the emergency override. The red button stared at him, crimson like the sea of hot blood that he would spill. Against his wishes, he read her lips. Don’t do this. A tear glistened in her eye.

The digital initiation sequencer counted inexorably downward: 8, 7, 6. . . He tore his gaze away from her, focusing on the red, red override button. Red like Leila’s lifeblood. Red like the blood of my whole village, shed by Christian dogs. Red like the obscene surf through which he, alone, had floated to wreak vengeance. It was Allah’s will.

With an inarticulate roar of triumph, Faisel snatched his hand back from the treacherous button.

3, 2, 1. . .

CHICAGO, 2009

Terrence stooped to pick glass bits from the sticky puddle. “Give me a minute. You’ve given me quite a fright.”

The Bowens exchanged confused glances. Harry recovered first. “Christ, Terrence, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Just leave that. What’s bothering you?”

Terrence stood unsteadily and crumpled onto the sofa. “The year 730. You’re sure of that?”

The physicist shrugged. “As sure as I am of any of this. Yes—if any of this holds water. As well as I can calculate it, Faisel traveled back to 725. If he survived, he’ll have experienced five years in his new time.

“Don’t take this wrong, by the way, but you look like shit. Can I get you another drink?”

That, anyway, was an easy question. Terrence nodded. “Yes, and not a liqueur. Scotch neat, please. A double.” He said no more until a new glass was in hand. He drained it without comment or apparent effect. “Another, please.”

Harry returned with a refill and a damp mop. “What is it, man? You’ve thought for years that Faisel was out there somewhere with his bomb. You’ve suspected for days that he’d traveled somewhere in time with his bomb. What about 730 A.D. makes it any worse?”

“It’s my turn to tell a story. A historian’s tale, now, not a cop’s. This is far worse than anything I could relate from my Interpol days.”

His hand trembling, Terrence set the new glass on the coffee table. “You’re right, Harry, that one person won’t—can’t—normally make much of a difference to history. At least that’s the current theory. Great social trends take time to form, then, like the tide, they overwhelm everyone and everything in their path. Momentum of the masses, if you’ll pardon a pun.” He coughed nervously, then pointed to the yet-again-empty glass.

“Take your civil war, for example. The Confederacy was hopelessly outnumbered and outresourced. For all his military genius, all Robert E. Lee did was postpone the inevitable. What he really accomplished through his brilliance was more casualties and increased destruction.

“So, righto, no one person really matters. Normally.”

Terrence felt his face was flushed, whether from the Scotch or Harry’s bombshell he couldn’t say. It hardly mattered. “But ever so rarely, all of history seems to be balanced precariously. When it happens, wildly different outcomes become equally possible.”

****

“Here’s a little known fact,” Terrence said. “The Arabic word for Europe is Firanja, from the Latin Francia. Are you familiar with the Franks?”

La belle Bowen fielded that one. “The barbarian founders of France. They took over the province that the Romans called Gaul. They would have been running the place when Faisel arrived.”

“Right. Anything else?”

“Well, Charles the Great, Charlemagne, was a Frank. I think that’s a little later. Didn’t he found the Holy Roman Empire? Anyway, I’ve shot my early-French-history wad. I think we covered everything before the Bourbons in about one lecture.”

She hadn’t mispronounced the dynasty name like the Kentucky whiskey. Harry, you’re a lucky man. “You’ve done better than most of the incoming students for my European Civ class. And better than about half of them at their final.” Terrence smiled weakly. “You, Harry?”

“Sorry, Terrence. Julia’s the cultured one.”

Terrence willed his shaking hands to be still. “The Romans were already collapsing when the Franks appeared at the Rhine, expelled from the Baltic region by even tougher barbarians from farther east. The Franks raided Gaul for a time, but some eventually settled there and became Roman mercenaries. A few even achieved high rank in the legions.

“As Rome weakened, the Franks moved into the vacuum. They fought alongside the Romans. After Rome itself fell to the barbarian hordes, the Franks fought on alone against one invading tribe after another. The Franks on the western side of the Rhine gradually adopted Roman ways and took on the task of defending civilization itself—that is, what little civilization they had themselves so far assimilated.

“Julia, you mentioned Charlemagne. The French and Germans still argue over who has the best claim to him—modern France and Germany date back to the division of Charlemagne’s empire after his death. The events we need to address occurred in the time of his grandfather.”

Terrence’s glass was once more filled; he took a long, appreciative swallow. “There is good reason why the Franks made such an impression on the Arabs. It happened at one of those rare times when maybe one man could determine the flow of history, a time when all future history lay balanced precariously on a cusp.”

He had the Bowens’ rapt attention.

“To set the stage, I must ask you to indulge me in a brief digression. From the fourth through the seventh centuries, the whole of classical civilization was in crisis. Nomadic hordes burst from what are now Mongolia and Manchuria, causing chaos throughout Asia and Europe. China fragmented. India was conquered. The Western Roman Empire collapsed. The Eastern Roman Empire, its capital at Constantinople, lost the Balkans to the barbarians.

“Quite separately, the seventh century also witnessed the founding of Islam and the launching of Holy War from Arabia. Persia, already weakened by the northern nomads, was conquered. Constantinople lost the Holy Land and all of North Africa.

“For a hundred years, the army of Islam knew only victory. The Caliph in Damascus ruled an empire that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, territories including Persia, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, parts of India, North Africa, and Spain.

“I’ve now set the stage. In 732, the centennial year of Mohammed’s death, the so-far-unstoppable Islamic empire made its big push on Europe. After hundreds of years of barbarian onslaughts, in the darkest of the Dark Ages, Western Europeans remembered civilization more than they practiced it. The Franks were the last defenders of that memory.

“Two great armies met in battle in west-central France, between the modern cities of Poitiers and Tours. The Franks narrowly won the day. The Berber and Bedouin forces were driven back into southern France. By 759 the Islamic armies had withdrawn permanently behind the Pyrenees into Iberia, what is now Spain.

“Soon after the battle of Tours, Islam split into rival sects: Shia and Sunni. The energies that had driven Islam’s expansion across three continents turned inward—into dynastic struggles, rival caliphates, and sectarian warfare.” Terrence coughed. “Shia and Sunni are still fighting each other.

“But I digress. Frankish and Islamic forces still battled from time to time, and Islam retained a foothold in Spain for more than seven hundred years, but the survival of the Frankish state was guaranteed by the victory at Tours. Francia, as much as the Roman Empire, was a progenitor of modern Europe.”

Julia went to sit beside Terrence on the sofa. She put an arm around his shoulders. “So you’re viewing Faisel’s return in the context of a rerun of the critical battle?”

The agent-turned-historian nodded. “The Franks at Tours reversed the rising tide of Islamic empire. What if the battle is replayed, and instead of a clash between straight swords and curved ones, the contest this time pits muscular strength against the atomic bomb?”

NEAR METZ, FRANCE, 2009

So far, the great international expedition had yielded only sore feet. Harry dialed his partner on his satellite phone. “Nothing here. Still.” He mopped sweat from his forehead with the back of a sleeve.

“We’re not looking for the Empire State Building. I expected this to take a while. Stay alert.” (Terrence’s normally deep voice sounded tinny over the little speaker. Why, in a gadget that went for five times the price of a high-end iPod, was the speaker so cheesy?)

So, Harry looked. He walked up, down, and around the hills surrounding the rebuilt Rothschild Institute. Only honking, of migrating geese and far-off impatient drivers, disturbed the silence. He covered the terrain to the west of the institute grounds; Terrence searched the east side. Once, through the trees, Harry spotted a promising heap of weathered stone, almost straight downhill from the research facility. His Geiger counter, alas, found the rock pile to be as inert as the rest of the countryside.

They met for a quick picnic lunch. The bread was crusty and fresh, the cheese toothsome and pungent. The vin ordinaire, unfortunately, really was. “You realize, Terrence, that this is a fools’ errand.”

Ambling smiled. “Don’t ever go into police work, my friend. Most of the job is looking for needles in haystacks.”

“The other part is the danger, the adrenaline rush that makes it all worthwhile?”

“No. Paperwork.”

“You misunderstand.” Harry stood, sore muscles protesting. “Yes, it would be wonderful if we found traces of radiation. It would be a relief to be sure Faisel nuked himself at the moment of arrival, that he’s not a danger anymore. My complaint wasn’t about the difficulty of finding proof. Quite the contrary: It should be easy.

“Look, if any plutonium 239 remained—and some would, because not every bit would fission—these Geiger counters would have found traces by now. It’s been, presumably, fewer than thirteen hundred years. The half-life of this stuff is more than twenty-four thousand years. Besides, I don’t see how we could overlook the crater. Yeah, yeah, I know”—Harry waved off the predictable rebuttal—“avalanches and erosion and the forest regrown. I don’t buy it. The first A-bomb, at Alamogordo, fused a circle eight hundred yards in diameter into glass. It used far less plutonium than Faisel has.”

Harry pointed toward the town of Metz a few miles away. “There was a town down there when Faisel arrived. Don’t you think someone might have noticed a mushroom cloud several miles tall? Events much less dramatic have been remembered from that long ago.”

Terrence sucked on a long blade of grass while the tirade wound down. “What do you suggest?”

“I’ve got no better idea than continuing. I’m just letting off steam.” Harry began stuffing their trash into his backpack. He paused to point. “I’ll look up that way next. I thought I saw a glint of sunlight reflect from something. Maybe I’ll be lucky.”

****

Jalal Ashrawi forced himself to lie still when one of the hikers suddenly pointed right at him. No, pointed toward him. In his camouflage pants and T-shirt, the thick underbrush surely concealed him. Still, he waited for the two men to look away before he cautiously lowered his binoculars.

He squirmed slowly uphill, taking care not to rustle the bushes. Once behind a stand of pines, he stood and stretched. Time to shift positions. He slipped through the trees, angling across the slope, gingerly testing his footing at each step before putting down his weight. He was hidden at a new vantage point before the noisy tourists finished gathering their trash.

Or were the two men tourists? Yes, almost everyone in the mountains fit that description, but it was self-defeating to assume that only tourists came. Palestinian students like Jalal had been coming up here for five years, had been watching—for they knew not what—that whole time. The elders of the revolution had assured them that their mission was important. Critical. The watchers would recognize what they were looking for when they saw it. Until then, lest they be questioned, it was best that they not know.

Jalal’s stomach growled. Well, envying their snack was not dereliction of duty. He brought his binoculars back to his eyes and studied the man striding up the slope toward his previous hiding spot. Tall, dark-haired, middle-aged, breathing hard from the exertion. He wore a backpack and carried something boxy in one hand. Boxy, but with something else (cylindrical? the item was half-obscured by the man’s hand) attached by a dangling cord. What? And why had the hikers separated? Perhaps they had merely happened upon each other, and, having eaten together, would go their separate ways.

What was that his quarry held? Jalal swore under his breath as the man half vanished into the undergrowth. The box he carried was somehow familiar. Now the man reemerged from the thicket, stopped, set down the box, and took a curiously large portable phone from his pocket. Jalal heard about every fourth word; it was enough to know that the man was American.

This was interesting. You either hike with someone, or you hike alone. You do not hike apart and chatter over phones. Suddenly his “hikers” seemed more like surveyors. What could they be up here to survey for?

And then Jalal knew where he had seen something like the American’s boxy gadget. When he wasn’t serving the cause, Jalal was a premed student. Two