Critical Mass (23 page)

“I can’t read that. Is it Pashto?”

“Dari, Pashto? What does it matter, some stupid writing of us fezzes?”

“You’ve conquered the world, haven’t you?”

“Allah has.” Then he took the knife from Wasim, and raised it to Vladimir’s throat.

Vladimir looked into Aziz’s eyes. “Old times,” Vladimir said.

Around them, the women, Eshan, Wasim, all became still. “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,” said Aziz. “You know, the Americans are on their way to this place already, aren’t they?” He smiled a little. “They have followed him. He has let them.”

“Aziz, no, I despise the Americans! Despise them!”

“You were in the pay of the CIA.”

“As were you!”

Aziz laughed at him. “But I ate the money.”

“Please, I can be of use. Yes, I’m a whore. But of course! Yours, now, Aziz.”

“Putin’s, the CIA’s, mine. Who knows who would be next? Nasrallah, perhaps? With Hezbollah singing the song of the Crusaders, why not?”

“The world hates you. The Muslims are all against you. Al-Zawahiri has condemned you!”

“Certainly. Al-Zawahiri is like Nasrallah. His whereabouts are known to the Crusaders. So he is nothing but their slave.”

“I can be of use!”

Aziz gave the knife to Eshan and turned away. “The Americans will be here soon,” Aziz told him. “This man works for them. We must go at once.” He hurried off down the low concrete corridor.

Behind him, there was the sound of the throat being expertly slit, a noise like water spattering. Aziz hesitated for a moment but did not turn back. He heard the thud of Vladimir’s collapse, and the drumming of his feet. When the bubbling of the breath faded, Aziz walked on. He had work to do, and very quickly.

His first wife, Zaaria, threw the gas cylinder she had carried off to one side. “Why are the Muslims against you?”

“No Muslims are against me. Only apostates.”

“And all these millions on your head, Aziz? What is this?”

“A Russian lie.”

She looked at him, her eyes dark in her concealing
hijab
.

“We leave at first light! Prepare everybody!”

“We go to Peshawar?”

“We go where God sends us.”

She hurried off toward the women’s chamber.

ONLY A DREAM

In Alexandria, Virginia, “Ronald Alfred Mullins” and his younger brother worked in
their garage. Ronald, whose real name was Bilal Aboud, had the plan in his hands. “The circular valve is to be turned twice,” he said to Hani.

“And then does it explode?”

“It does not explode. Turn the valve, Hani.” During the night, Bilal had heard Hani weeping. He had seen Hani go to the kitchen and eat peanut butter from the jar, and had heard his smacking. He must not weigh more than 128 pounds or the plane could not fly, and for that he had needed to starve himself for nearly a month. His Ramadan fast had never ended.

Of the two of them, only Bilal knew what the word “purple” that had appeared in the craigslist advert meant. When he had been counseled by the psychiatrist about how to ensure that Hani would indeed carry out his mission, it had been explained to Bilal that anticipation was the worst thing. So he had not told Hani when the flight would take place. However, they had to be in readiness, and so had to install the bomb into the airframe.

Hani had also been carefully trained. He knew not to ask, knew that he did not want to know: “The only thing that matters, Hani, is what you are doing right now.” So Hani had trained like that, concentrating only on the momentary activity. He would think of getting the plane off the ground,
then of the four-minute flight to his ascension point, then of pulling back the stick. He would not think of his death, never that, never at all. He was not a simple creature; he had his own ideas of heaven and afterlife. In truth, he did not think he had an afterlife. Hoped he didn’t, because what he was going to do was so extremely evil. But he had his brothers’ and sisters’ lives to consider, and the honor of his family. Their father, he believed, had been shot dead by Blackwaters in Baghdad. He had been an electrical engineer driving to his work. He was not a fighter of any kind at all. He had been shot, Hani had been told, for sport. People said that he had pleaded, but the Blackwaters had shot him, then shared cigarettes among themselves. Perhaps he had been killed by American mercenaries . . . or perhaps by somebody seeking to radicalize the two English-speaking brothers. In any case, Hani fought for honor, not for access to a heaven he did not believe was even there. For him, America was Blackwater.

“Now, this is the bomb?”

“This is the bomb.”

“There’s a lot of wiring. It looks delicate.”

“It only needs to work once.”

“Will the radiation kill us?”

“Not as long as the plutonium is properly contained.”

Hani laid a hand on it. “Cold,” he said.

“You can’t feel the power of it.”

The two of them lifted the black melon by its handles, moving it into the flimsy aircraft.

“It’s not easy! Careful!”

It was not supposed to exist, this bomb weighing only two hundred pounds. But it did, did it not, and there were many more of them, Bilal hoped. The new land mines was how Bilal thought of them.

It dropped down into the compartment they had welded together with such effort, struggling with modifications to the kit. But this was satisfying. It was stable in its position now.

“Now, the wings,” Hani said.

They had to fix the wings to the body of the aircraft, which must be done in the street. It could not be done here; there wasn’t enough space. “It is not time,” Bilal said.

Hani smiled. “Time is only a dream. As is this life, also nothing but a dream.”

Bilal laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Allah has no need of time. In heaven eternal, there is no time.”

“Do you believe it, Bilal?”

Bilal did not like this question. He himself couldn’t fly the plane; he was too heavy. In the training camp in Texas, he had been taught that when a pilot asked when he must fly that was a danger sign. “I believe that the world the Crusaders have made is evil,” Bilal said. “The nation that murdered Dad for sport is evil.”

Hani nodded. “We’ve never been able to train with the wings. Do you think we’ll get them to work?”

“If God wills.” The wings had been modified to fold back, and would need to be carefully opened and locked, once the plane was out in the street. That would be the most dangerous moment.

“Bilal, I’m—”

“We are all afraid. It’s natural.”

Hani smiled again. In it Bilal saw a new fragility, and he thought that Hani was failing in his resolve.

“I was going to say I’m hungry. I want some lunch.”

Bilal put his hand on his brother’s narrow shoulder. They went to the kitchen together.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

Rashid’s space was tiny and stuffy and deep, so crammed with equipment that it
was almost impossible for him to move from his chair. Rashid hated the claustrophobic hole. He had not even wanted to come in during drills. But now he must live here, in a tiny two-man bunk with another controller. He was the only Muslim among them, of course. The token.

He did not dislike his coworkers. In fact, very much the opposite. Their dedication to the service was admirable. They were not Muslim because they did not understand, not because they had rejected the faith. They were not like his sister, foolish creature, with her apostasies. Why not bow before the word of God, proud woman?

Even though she had accepted the faith and prayed—actually prayed—she had her demonic justifications for not even so much as wearing the veil, except when she pleased. Immodest creature, self-willed sinner!

Her arrogance was why he had suggested that the first demand be the veil. She had ignored it. Had she not, perhaps he would have also suggested that the bomb be detonated in the wilderness, not over Las Vegas. He would have accepted the danger of making such a suggestion to the powers. So it was her, Nabila. She had killed Las Vegas, and before he was through with her he would make certain she understood that the bombing there was on
her head. Once this was over and power properly consolidated, it would be his faithful pleasure to execute her with his own hands.

Before him was an array of screens, each one providing a different view of his surveillance sector. It was normally a high-interest area, but at present management was concentrating on the continental United States, not on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

His mission was to co-analyze production from the new Rugby Altair class Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites, and the Echo 12 systems in higher Molniya, invaluable for his current effort, because of their dwell capability. It was a piece of luck that the Echo 12s were at a high fuel level, having been refueled by Shuttle Mission STS-201 last month.

He had all manner of software assistance and his computers were essential to his work, but he had intentionally developed a reputation for liking to look at his imagery at once, rather than waiting for it to process. He was extremely careful and, he thought, extremely good. Never, at any time, did he do anything that might suggest that he had another agenda. Of course, they watched the Muslim with a special eye. Of course, they secretly despised him. It wasn’t their fault; it was the evil in them. Evil comes to us all. We must actively go to the good, and Crusader lies made it hard for these poor people to do that. Greed, the dark master of the West, had locked their hearts, and a good Muslim addressed their tragic state with compassion. This was what Nabila didn’t understand. When they were unpleasant to her in the shops or whatever, she cursed and spat and stomped out her rage. She should thank God for the blessing they gave her, which was a chance to give her suffering to Allah.

Rashid’s teacher at the mosque, who had brought him out of the folly of moderation and into the light of the truth, had said to him, “Evil exploits human weakness. The men of the West are not to blame any more than locusts are to blame. But we must still kill the locusts, or the field will be ruined.”

That was true, and look why—even now, there was blue water at the north pole in the summertime, the glaciers of Greenland were sliding into the sea, the oil of his homeland was being devoured by the Great Satan and his minions, and God’s beautiful earth was dying beneath an avalanche of plastic bags, discarded buttons, bottles, toys, and who knew what else—a mess being made by humankind, in defiance of the will of God.

Rashid never did anything to compromise his mission, but he also
served his real master, and as he watched his screens he saw that this service was going to once again be needed.

His protocols dictated which sectors he was to observe most carefully, and the Pamir Panhandle was not one of them. This was why, when the clear outline of a Fennek reconnaissance vehicle appeared during a lookdown, he had to fight his rising heartbeat. This was important, because everybody knew that inappropriate indications of stress could bring on an incident-targeted lie detector test—and not with a polygraph, not anymore. The much more effective No Lie fMRI was now in use, and like all of his colleagues, he’d had a baseline exam that made it essentially impossible for him to conceal a falsehood. He must never forget, not now: all they had to do was ask the right question and he was finished.

He queried ISAF HQ, Afghanistan, for their deployments in or near 37°19'43"N, 70°44'35"E. What a Fennek might be doing in an area he secretly knew to be enormously sensitive he did not know, but it was very worrisome, and he had no choice but to take the risk of asking.

ISAF came back: “No deployment coordinates req.” So it wasn’t a Fennek but rather a vehicle disguised to appear to be a Fennek. This meant only one thing: Russians. Russians were within a few kilometers of their old installation. From its size and shape, he thought they must be in an old BRDM reconnaissance vehicle, fitted with plywood panels to make it appear from above to be modern NATO equipment.

Of course, they would have blueprints of the Pamir installation. They would know all the old trip wires, all the mantraps, and, above all, the secret ways in through the ventilation system, pathways that NATO would not have mined. They would be able to penetrate right to the heart of the place without detection. Would Russians understand what was being done there?

He could not even ask that question. The fact was that they were penetrating the place, so of course they knew something, possibly everything.

They must have come in through Tajikistan, a team of specialists. Putin must have realized his mistake in letting Inshalla have this base in the first place, and the Russians were there to clean house. They would kill Aziz and his entourage, and clean up the entire base to a forensic level of thoroughness. Inshalla had done Russia’s secret work in throwing America into chaos, and now it was time for it to stop.

It must not stop.

Perhaps he could suggest an attack on the Russian target. There were
SiMiCon Rotor Craft available in Afghanistan, armed with Hellfire missiles. But no, that would look like he was reaching above his level of authority, perhaps attempting to bypass his superiors, and that would cause suspicion.

He composed an instant message: “Poss. Russian BRDM-2U camoed as German-marking Fennek observed scout mode coordinates near 37°19'43"N, 70°44'35"E. Unknown mission. Lookback shows route out of Tajikistan. Recommend immediate site investigation Sov era installations region.”

He could not warn anybody in Pamir. He knew this: if the martyrdom of Aziz as Mahdi was meant to be, it would be. God forgot nothing, knew everything. However, it was hard for Rashid as a technician in command of these powerful resources not to try to help Allah decide what his will was going to be.

“Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar. . . .”

The words had come as if from the interior of his own soul. They shocked him so badly that he almost lost his balance in his seat. Instinct caused him to pull down the cover that concealed his controls. And then he saw a face peering at him over the cubicle partition. His neighbor, Carol Wilkie.