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A NOTE ABOUT THE SAMPLE SCENES I have endeavored to select scenes which give a flavor of the book but
which DO NOT reveal too much about the plot. For that reason, you may find
yourself wondering what certain scenes have to do with the story . . . If so,
I've done my job. |
Book
Two:
Birth of an Age
The following is taken from Chapters 4 and 5 of Birth of an Age -- Book Two of The Christ Clone Trilogy
Kitt Peak Observatory, Arizona
High above the Papago Indian reservation, nestled among the granite crags and cliffs of Kitt Peak, the white dome of Steward Observatory stood like a giant white mushroom. Home to the largest concentration of operating telescopes in the Northern Hemisphere and credited with numerous astronomical firsts, Kitt Peak served on this occasion as the backup to Canada’s Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. It was not a role the scientists of Kitt Peak expected to be called upon to fulfill, but it should have been a simple matter of turning on their broadcast equipment and synchronizing the hand‑off from Dominion. At the moment the call came, however, Dr. Chapman of Kitt Peak was busy with a problem of his own. He and his colleagues had not even noticed the problem with the broadcast picture from Dominion.
“Dr. Chapman, this is Dr. Watson at Dominion Observatory in Canada,” the call began. “We have a problem here with our 7.7-meter telescope. So far we’ve been able to compensate, but I wanted to give you the heads up just in case.”
“Thanks,” Chapman said, “but I’m afraid we have some problems of our own with our 11-meter SMT. For some reason—we can’t seem to isolate the cause—it appears we have a cumulative error in our segment positioning system, making it look as though asteroid 2031 KD has changed its course.”
For a long moment there was silence.
“Hello?” Dr. Chapman said, as he began to wonder if they had been cut off.
“I’m here,” responded Dr. Watson at Dominion. “How long ago did this start?”
“We first noticed it about ten minutes ago,” Chapman answered.
Again there was silence. “Have you been monitoring our picture?” Watson asked after a moment.
“Well, not for the last few minutes. Like I said, we’ve been pretty busy with our own equipment. Why? What’s the problem?”
“You’d better have a look.”
Dr. Chapman leaned back in his chair and twisted his neck to look around a table at the large split screen monitor of the two asteroids. It took a moment for him to see the shift and when he did, he could not believe what he saw. Jumping up from his chair, he took the phone with him so that he could see the screen more clearly. The unobstructed view and new orientation changed nothing. It took only seconds for Dr. Chapman to realize what was happening. This wasn’t coincidence. It couldn’t be.
On his end of the phone, Dr. Watson heard only the sound of men talking in the background. “Tom! Frank!” Chapman called to his associates. “Look at this!” he shouted, pointing toward the monitor.
Chapman’s two associates looked at the monitor, then back at the image from their own telescope, and then back at Chapman, their eyes asking the same question: Was the image on the monitor coming from their telescope? Chapman shook his head in answer. The taller of the two men looked at a small monitor that indicated the picture’s source; the other stared back at the picture on the large monitor.
“What is it?” Dr. Watson’s voice asked over the phone in response to the long silence, but Chapman didn’t respond.
“This can’t happen!” Dr. Watson heard someone on Chapman’s end of the phone yell, offering confirmation of his worst fears.
“Have you verified this with anyone else?” Chapman asked Watson hurriedly. “What about with the Hubble?”
“Stay on the line,” Watson said. “We’ll do that right now.” It really wasn’t necessary: Kitt Peak was well-equipped to verify what was happening, but for about forty-five seconds Chapman held the phone as he listened to the ensuing hysteria that erupted when Watson passed along the content of the call to the others at Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. Then he hung up and sat back down, not waiting for Watson to return to the phone. Behind him reporters, now ignoring the boundaries meant to keep them out of the way of the astronomers, demanded to know what was happening. The other two astronomers quickly called other observatories, hoping to find something that would tell them they were wrong, but there was no mistake. It took only a few moments to be sure.
Asteroid 2031 KD had inexplicably changed course and was now headed dangerously close to a collision with the earth. It was impossible to determine where, or even if it would hit; there was no time to run simulations. The asteroid was now only 8,640 miles away and would reach the earth’s outer atmosphere in less than eight minutes.
* * *
At 7:33:22 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), 317 miles above the earth’s surface and directly over the northern Siberian village of Tiksi near the Lena Delta, asteroid 2031 KD, traveling at a speed of 18 miles per second (64,440 miles per hour), entered the most remote region of the earth’s ionosphere. Its angle of descent was so slight that it traveled more than seven miles horizontally to the earth’s surface for every one mile it dropped. At that angle, the density of the atmosphere increased relatively slowly, with the result that the asteroid’s surface temperature rose only about a dozen degrees Celsius with each passing second. The slow but steady increase in resistance of the denser atmosphere against the asteroid’s irregular shape, combined with its unusual axis of rotation, caused the asteroid to begin to tumble and spin.
Eighty-one seconds after entering the ionosphere, at an altitude of 108 miles, the friction of the atmosphere caused the skin of the tumbling asteroid to superheat and glow. Sixteen seconds later it penetrated the outer regions of the stratosphere, 60 miles above the earth’s surface. Nearly coincident to this, the asteroid’s surface temperature reached 1,527 degrees Celsius, the melting point of the nickel‑iron alloy that made up the great majority of its now wildly tumbling mass. As it did, millions of tiny droplets, or ablation flakes, of molten metal began to peel away from the twelve‑mile-wide colossus, leaving a visible metallic trail of red‑hot nickel iron and combining with the friction of the asteroid to superheat the atmosphere around it.
Had it been a more spherical object, the asteroid would have maintained the same trajectory it had when it entered the atmosphere. That course would have brought it to within twenty-nine miles of the earth’s surface over northern Canada—never actually coming in contact with the earth, but continuing on after a six and a half minute sojourn, back into space. Such had been the case in August 1972 when a large meteoroid passed through the atmosphere over the western United States and Canada. What made this incident different was the asteroid’s irregular shape. As the asteroid encountered denser and denser air, two forces worked increasingly against each other: inertia and drag. Just as the design of an airplane wing gives the airplane lift, so the shape and tumbling of the asteroid combined to impel it in the opposite direction, that is, to force it down toward the earth. At this point, inertia was winning. But drag had already forced the asteroid several miles lower, and with each mile the air grew thicker and the drag grew greater.
It would be erroneous to say that the asteroid was falling; the earth’s gravity played almost no part in the asteroid’s course. Its speed when it entered the atmosphere was more than two and a half times the velocity needed to escape the earth’s gravity, and thus far, that speed had decayed by only a relatively insignificant .6 miles per second. Other factors, however, did come into play to affect the asteroid’s course relative to the earth’s surface. These included the continuing orbit of the earth around the sun; the curvature of the earth; and to a small extent, even the earth’s rotation, at the comparatively slow speed of about 1,000 miles per hour. Combined, the effect was that the path of the asteroid arched like a pitcher’s curve ball, carrying it slightly to the east in its predominantly southern course, as it moved ever closer to the earth’s surface.
Seconds later, above the Beaufort Sea, north of Mackenzie Bay in Canada’s Northwest Territory, the asteroid reached a critical point in its approach. Because of atmospheric physics, a sonic boom generated at heights above thirty-seven miles reflects upward off of the denser atmosphere below, thereby preventing any sound from reaching ground level. Now, however, 111 seconds after entering the atmosphere, as the asteroid dropped below thirty-seven miles, a sonic boom as powerful as the strongest earthquake issued forth through the heat-blistered sky.
* * *
Below the asteroid, near Kay Point, south of Herschel Island, the men of a half-dozen Inuit Eskimo families waited patiently in their boats, some with hand‑held harpoons, others with high‑powered rifles, scanning the bay for the dingy gray‑white backs of beluga whales to break the surface. It was 11:35 p.m. local time, but that hardly mattered this far north and at this time of year in the “land of the midnight sun.” The last sunrise had been on June 21, twelve days before, and the next sunset would not come for another fifteen days, on July 18. On the shore a few hundred yards away, the men’s families slept in tents, waiting for the next kill when they would strip the muktuk and despoil the white whale of every usable part. Suddenly, all eyes turned toward the sky and stared in awe at heaven’s display. In mere seconds it was gone, trailing off into the southern sky.
For a moment after the asteroid passed, the men stood frozen in silence. And then all at once they shouted to each other in their native Inuktitut with such great excitement that, for the moment, they totally ignored the pair of beluga whales that had surfaced just twenty meters away. Then someone pointed and called out. Quickly the men in the boats nearest the whales put the asteroid out of their minds and went to work, starting their small outboard motors and maneuvering their eighteen‑foot crafts as close to the unsuspecting beluga as possible. Near the bow of each boat, two men stood ready, one poised with a hand‑held harpoon connected by rope to a pair of empty aluminum beer kegs, the other with a rifle, hoping to finish the job quickly after the harpoon was set.
Traveling at 1,100 feet per second, it would be nearly three full minutes before the asteroid’s sonic boom reached the boats below. When it did it would hit like a brick wall, shattering the fiberglass boat hulls as if they were cheap stage glass, and splintering the bones of the men and their families like balsa wood, reducing their lifeless bodies to formless heaps.
* * *
Behind the asteroid a tremendous vacuum formed, which the surrounding atmosphere rushed to fill, creating a tail of supersaturated air from above the Arctic Ocean and a wake of wind which curled off, forming row upon row of super cyclones like giant eddies behind the paddle of a boat.
To the residents of Kaktovik, Alaska, 125 miles to the west, the asteroid appeared in the sky as an enormous flaming star. (It would be eight and a half minutes before the first winds reached them; less than two minutes later, no one would be left alive as the entire town was blown into the Arctic Sea.) To the ill‑fated Inuit Eskimos near Kay Point, directly beneath the asteroid, it had seemed as though the midnight sun had exploded. Twelve seconds later, to the people of Fort McPherson, two hundred miles farther south, at which point the asteroid streaked by only twenty-six miles overhead, it was as if the heavens themselves were on fire.
No one at Ft. McPherson understood what was happening. The news of the change in the asteroid’s course was only now being broadcast on television and radio and, without time to run computer simulations, no one could even begin to project the asteroid’s course or where, when, or if it would actually collide with the earth. In Ft. McPherson, parents pointed and young children clapped in delight as if viewing fireworks. Nearly everyone, young and old alike, was up despite the late hour to watch the asteroid. They had been told to expect no more than a bright light, like a huge star, traveling swiftly across the sky. What they saw instead was a flaming, tumbling mountain the size of Manhattan Island hurtling past them at unbelievable speed, followed by a fiery trail as bright as morning itself. It was an awesome sight that no one really had time to take in. Four seconds later, with the asteroid already 66 miles farther south but still clearly in view because of its enormous size, the people of Fort McPherson still stared in wonder as they were engulfed from behind in a nuclear‑force wall of heat.
There was no chance to escape, but at least their deaths were quick. Everyone and everything for fifteen miles to the east and west of Fort McPherson were incinerated and turned to ash within seconds. What didn’t burn, melted, and all was swept away in the asteroid’s tremendous wake, leaving no trace on the suddenly‑barren landscape of the homes, schools, or lives of the 720 stalwart souls who had lived there.
The following is taken from Chapter 9 of Birth of an Age -- Book Two of The Christ Clone Trilogy
New York
Decker Hawthorne tipped the driver and got out of the cab in front of the UN Secretariat Building. It was a hazy, dreary day, as were most days, but it was getting better. Much of the volcanic ash had settled and the temperature was now only twelve degrees below normal, but only infrequently was the sun seen clearly. Grass was growing again. There was that much to be thankful for. And while the diminished sunlight had stunted the growth of grain grasses, there would be at least a modest harvest.
As Decker approached the revolving doors into the Secretariat’s lobby, he heard what sounded like a helicopter approaching and looked up. But instead of a helicopter it seemed as if the volcanic ash cover had suddenly become a thick gray liquid, slowly pouring out upon the earth. He squinted, hoping to get a clearer focus, but to no avail. As the darkness descended, the sound intensified. Decker ran and ducked for protection under the overhang of the building in front of the door and then looked up again. The sound was now a roar that seemed to fill the sky over the entire city. The bulk of the shadowy mass was a few hundred feet above ground, but parts of it ran down like heavy oil, covering the tops of surrounding buildings and even the upper branches of trees. Around him Decker heard sudden shrill screams and then he saw more clearly what it was: an immense swarm of insects of a type he had never seen before. They were as large as small birds—and there were millions of them.
Decker ran for the door but a dozen of the insects had already landed on him. He made it inside, but in doing so he allowed a hundred more to fly past him into the building. Most of the insects clung to his clothes but one climbed up his collar to his neck. Decker reached up to knock it away but it was too late. Searing pain nearly knocked him off his feet as the creature simultaneously stung him with a stinger in its tail and bit into the soft flesh of his neck to feast on his blood. In the lobby people screamed and swatted desperately as the insects bit and stung their exposed flesh.
The pain seemed unbearable, but Decker tried again to grab at the one on his neck, hoping to crush it in his hand. It was larger than he expected, nearly filling his palm. Unable to crush it, Decker ripped it from his neck and flung it to the floor and stepped on it. He put his full weight on the creature before its exoskeleton finally gave way, spitting guts and blood—some of it Decker’s—onto the floor.
Outside, people ran through the streets, vainly hoping to escape or to get to an open door. Those inside, fearing the insects would enter along with the fleeing people, locked or blocked the doors, leaving the unfortunates to fend for themselves. True to the prophecy, only those who had “the seal of God on their foreheads”—the members of the Koum Damah Patar with their bloody sign of membership written above their brow—were spared. A pair of KDP members who had been across the street from the UN when Decker arrived stood watching the attack, completely untouched by the insects.
All around Decker the screams and swatting increased as more people from the plaza area in front of the Secretariat came in the revolving doors, each time letting in more of the insects. In his agony, Decker was totally unaware of the additional insects that still clung to his clothing. Then suddenly he felt another fiery sting on his left ankle just above his shoe, and then immediately another on his left thigh, and then another on his right calf near the back of his knee. They were all over him, chewing and thrashing at the fabric of his suit with their teeth and spiny legs, digging their heads and stingers down into his flesh. As each one stung, he grabbed at it and threw it to the floor, but the pain had become too excruciating for him to step on them. As they hit the hard tile floor the insects lay stunned for a few seconds and then reoriented themselves and either flew to another victim or reattached themselves to Decker. Finally Decker fell to the floor, writhing in pain as two more insects crawled inside the back of his suit coat and began tearing at his shirt. He was in too much pain to continue to fight, but with all the strength he had left he rolled over on his back, hoping to crush them. It only drove the stingers deeper.
There was a stampede to get away from the lobby: People were pushing and shoving and climbing over each other. Those who could find an open door ducked into offices, locking the door behind them to keep others out.
Lying on his back unable to move, another insect landed on Decker’s face. As it was about to sting him, Decker passed out. When he did, the insect strangely seemed to lose interest and flew away. The others on him did the same. The two on his back beneath him released their hold and scratched and squirmed along his back trying to get out from under him. As entomologists would discover later, the insects would not attack a victim that had already been driven into unconsciousness by their stings.
Outside, thousands of the insects flew into the plate glass, trying to reach the people inside. The collision only seemed to stun them and the sidewalk below the window became alive with the wobbly hexapods attempting to regain their bearings and fly away.
Perhaps the insects’ greatest weakness was their persistence; once they had landed on a victim they would not cease their attack until they had drunk their fill of blood or until the person fell unconscious. This persistence added to the fierceness of their assault, but it also made them sitting ducks. By the time additional security personnel from all over the building began to reach the lobby, most of the insects inside had already attached themselves to their selected victims and, except for those withdrawing from unconscious victims, few were left to interfere with the security personnel’s efforts. As one group of the security force ensured that no more insects would get in the doors, others attempted to help the victims and quickly found, as Decker had, that the best way to kill the creatures was to pull them from their host, throw them to the hard floor, and then to step on them with their full weight.
Soon afterward, teams from the UN’s medical facility arrived and began helping the victims. Scores lay unconscious on the floor while others screamed in pain from the welts that rose where they had been stung. A security guard who had captured two of the insects alive held one in each hand by the backs of their strange trunks as they squirmed and struggled in his hands, trying in vain to reach some part of his flesh with their stingers. He had pulled the insects from the face and leg of an elderly woman as they sucked the blood from their nearly unconscious victim. Someone would no doubt want to have a look at the peculiar creatures. Standing there, he began to wonder where he would find a glass jar large enough to put them in.
Outside, the rumbling of the insects’ wings suddenly grew louder as millions of them began to fly away. Within thirty seconds they were all gone, headed for another part of the city and fresh victims. The sidewalk and street were littered with unconscious people in crumpled heaps.
* * *
There was no consensus and not even very many guesses among entomologists as to the particular species or even genus of the insect. Whatever it was, it was something no one had ever before reported—a strange mutation without explanation. The insects ranged from two and a half to three inches in length and were approximately three-quarters of an inch across the back, and slightly less than that thick. Their wings were sturdy but transparent with a wingspan of a little more than six inches. They were covered with a thick dark gray exoskeleton over most of the body, giving the appearance of heavy armor. It was this aegis that made crushing the insects so difficult. Over the head of the insect the exoskeleton was spiny and luminous gold with perhaps a hundred inch‑long soft fibers extruding from beneath, which looked remarkably like human hair. The insect’s face bore an eerie resemblance to a human face, but was somewhat flatter. Its mouth, which, relative to a human face was easily twice as wide, exhibited fearsome‑looking fangs that it used to rapidly chew through clothing and then bite its victim. The tail of the insect carried a large stinger, used to inject its victim with an unidentified poison.
The insects traveled in immense swarms up to fifteen miles across, and stayed in one place just long enough to feed off conscious victims before moving on. The swarm that had descended on the United Nations Plaza was now moving northeast, but it was just one of hundreds of swarms that had appeared suddenly throughout the world. In areas of the world where shelters were constructed of materials less substantial than concrete, steel, and glass, far more people were bitten and stung by the creatures than had been in New York.
Laboratory dissection revealed one additional feature that added to the entomologists’ confusion about the origin of the insects: They had absolutely no identifiable reproductive organs.
The following is taken from Chapter 14 of Birth of an Age -- Book Two of The Christ Clone Trilogy
South of As‑Mubarraz, Saudi Arabia
The sound of air passing through regulators was entirely drowned out by the swirling blades of the United Nations helicopter as it hovered a few hundred yards from a camp of eighty to a hundred Bedouin tribesmen a few miles south of the helicopter’s destination of As‑Mubarraz, Saudi Arabia. Inside the helicopter, a team of four men and two women plus the helicopter’s pilot and copilot studied the actions of the tribesmen, while cameras recorded the event and transmitted the pictures via satellite to an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. According to satellite data, a rapidly‑growing circle of death, inside of which no human life remained, extended from Yazd, Iran, in the east, 1,050 miles to Mahattat Al‑Qatrānah, Jordan, in the west; from Nachičevań, Azerbajdzanskaja, in the north, 920 miles to Al‑Hulwah, Saudi Arabia, in the south. As‑Mubarraz, 82 miles below the southernmost edge of the circle, thus far appeared to be unaffected, and the Bedouin camp was the first sign of human life the team had spotted this close to the periphery of the circle.
The preponderance of evidence about the circle of death indicated the presence of some incredibly fast‑acting, 100 percent virulent, rapidly‑dispersing biological or chemical agent. There were two pieces of data that conflicted with that thesis. The first was that whatever the killing agent was, it traveled in all directions at about the same speed and was therefore unaffected by air currents, as would have been the case with any known nuclear, biological, or chemical agent. The second chink in the thesis was the macabre video report that had come from World News Network in Riyadh.
For protection, each member of the helicopter’s crew and research team wore an entirely self‑contained nuclear/biological/chemical suit that provided protection against any infiltrant larger than .005 microns. Gas masks were used until the helicopter came to within twenty kilometers of the city, after which point respiration was provided by individual tanks of compressed air carried by each member of the scientific team and the crew members. Because of this protective encasement, communications among the team were carried out by means of short‑range radio transmitters and receivers built into their masks and hoods. Anything said by a member of the team would be heard by all other members and transmitted back by the helicopter’s communications equipment to the carrier in the Indian Ocean.
There was no indication of anything unusual when the helicopter reached the southern edge of the city. The residents were going about their daily lives. Hovering about 150 feet above the ground, the six cameras mounted below the helicopter recorded everything they encountered, providing a complete panoramic view from the chopper’s belly. Inside, the team members scanned the vicinity for anything that seemed at all unusual, but found nothing. The team leader, Colonel Terry Crystal, leaned through the doorway from the cargo bay to the helicopter’s cockpit and signaled the pilot to proceed northward, stopping at each of the predetermined coordinates for subsequent inspection.
The helicopter was a flying laboratory with equipment on board to provide immediate analysis of all environmental data and the retrieval and collection of samples for further analysis on their return to their base in Qal’at Bishna. At each of the several stops made over the city, air samples were taken for immediate analysis, but so far nothing unusual had been found.
Arriving at the northern edge of the city, the helicopter slowed again, hovering while the team repeated its routine. If nothing was found, the itinerary would take them next to Al‑Hulwah, a location within the known radius of the circle of death, where satellite scanners indicated no human life remained. The air sample from the city’s northern border indicated the presence of no contaminants, and there appeared to be no visual indication of anything out of the ordinary on the ground. Colonel Crystal checked with each member of his team and then, leaning back into the cockpit again, motioned to the pilot to continue.
The pilot was about to carry out Crystal’s order when the copilot thought he noticed something. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to something on the ground.
Crystal and the pilot looked where the copilot was pointing. “It’s just a woman doing her laundry in a washtub,” Crystal said.
“No, look closer,” the copilot insisted.
Colonel Crystal picked up his binoculars and stepped into the cockpit for a better view. “What is that?” he gasped, still holding the binoculars. His response drew the attention of the rest of the team in the helicopter’s bay. As the members of the team looked on in horror, a woman in her mid-twenties held a baby by its feet while its head dangled, submerged beneath the water of her washtub.
“There’s something else!” someone said, pointing about a hundred yards from the woman. Shifting their attention, they watched as a man with a pitchfork ran up behind another man and drove the instrument through his body and out his chest.
“Quick! The woman!” someone else yelled cryptically, and pointed back to the previous scene, where a man with a rifle was approaching. A second later, at point‑blank range the man put the rifle to the woman’s chest and pulled the trigger.
“Get us out of range of that rifle!” Colonel Crystal ordered quickly.
“Everybody hang on!” the pilot yelled as he pulled the chopper sharply up and to the left to take cover behind one of the city’s taller buildings. He did so just in time, as the man turned and started shooting at them.
“Look! Over there!” one of the female team members called.
“And over there!” someone else said.
It quickly became apparent that there were more than enough atrocities to keep them all busy; no one needed to point them out. Even from a distance of hundreds of feet in the air, the carnage was sickening to watch. The madness spread below them at incredible speed.
“Are we getting all this on camera?” Crystal asked.
“Yes sir,” came the answer from the team member monitoring the cameras.
“Let’s get our air samples and get out of here,” the colonel directed as he stepped back into the cockpit. The cockpit’s large windows provided a much wider angle of view than the observation windows in the helicopter’s bay. Despite the horror on the ground, the attention of all three men in the cockpit was fixed on it, unable to conceive of such mindless slaughter. For a while no one spoke; they all watched in disbelief, struggling to comprehend what could be causing this.
“Sir,” the pilot said, addressing Colonel Crystal, “I don’t know what’s going on down there, but if your people have their samples, I think we ought to get out of here and come back for the other tests when things have calmed down. Right now we’re a sitting duck for anyone with a gun. They’ve pretty much ignored us so far, but—” The pilot’s sentence was cut short by a flashing light on the instrument panel, followed by a sudden shift in the helicopter’s weight distribution. “Someone’s opened the bay door!” he yelled.
Crystal turned on his heel and rushed back into the helicopter’s bay. What he saw there defied logical explanation. The bay door was indeed open as the pilot’s instruments had indicated, but the research team was gone.
After waiting a moment but hearing no word from Colonel Crystal, the pilot decided to have a look for himself. “Take over,” he told his copilot. “I’m going back to see what’s going on.”
The same scene greeted him as had met Crystal. The door was open and no one was there—not even Colonel Crystal. “No one’s back here!” he reported in stunned disbelief to his copilot by way of the internal radio in their protective suits. “It looks like they’ve all jumped!”
It didn’t take much to realize that whatever was affecting the people on the ground had taken its toll on the research team. “Let’s get out of here, skipper,” the copilot answered.
“Roger that. Just let me get this door shut and we’ll be gone!”
The pilot moved quickly to the rear of the bay and reached to pull the door shut. Behind him there was a flash of movement and someone lunged from behind some equipment. Hit by the man’s full weight, the pilot flew through the open doorway of the helicopter along with his attacker. Tumbling toward his certain death, he saw who had tackled him. It was Colonel Crystal.
“Get back to base!” the pilot yelled as loud as he could, hoping that he was still within range for radio contact with his copilot—it was imperative that the data gathered by the team be delivered. Two seconds later the pilot and Crystal were dead.
Inside the helicopter, the copilot had heard the pilot’s last order and was already making good its completion. Moving south as quickly as the chopper would take him, he retreated back the way they had come. Everywhere below him the killing progressed with amazing speed. The cameras were still rolling, capturing the details of the bloodshed and sending them back to a stunned analysis team in the Indian Ocean. Then unexpectedly, the copilot caught the smell of something like rotten eggs or burning sulfur.
* * *
The dark legions of the Euphrates River had not yet reached the Bedouin encampment south of the city. Looking up from feeding his father’s camels, a teenage Bedouin boy watched with great interest the return of the helicopter that had passed overhead about half an hour earlier. Curiously, it flew straight toward them and upon reaching their camp, hovered there, frightening the animals and bringing everyone out of their tents. For a moment nothing happened, and then it seemed as though rain was falling, but the rain burned their eyes. The “rain” was fuel from the helicopter’s tanks being dumped on the camp and blown about by the helicopter’s blades. Many people took shelter in their tents, which soaked up the gas. With about a quarter of its fuel remaining, the helicopter shot straight up into the sky. At a thousand feet the copilot changed course and took the helicopter into a power dive, driving the exploding craft directly into the heart of the Bedouin camp and turning the entire landscape into a spectacular blazing inferno.