THE MASTER’S CRY

WRATH & RIGHTEOUSNESS

[Episode Five]

CHRIS STEWART

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used factiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locals or persona, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Foreword

The technologies depicted in this book and their potential effects upon society are real and accurately portrayed. While the possibility of an electromagnetic pulse (“EMP”) attack and the widespread devastation it would cause are well-known among the military and intelligence community, they are much less known among other government offices and the general population. Why this is the case I have often wondered, but have no explanation.

There is a great deal of information available regarding the subject. I encourage interested readers to pursue their own research and would suggest the Senate reports referred to in the narrative as a good starting place.

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

“When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.”

Winston Churchill

ONE

Raven Rock (Site R), Underground Military Complex, Southern Pennsylvania

The president of the United States was almost dead.

His helicopter had not survived the shock wave that blew outward at the speed of sound from the core of the nuclear explosion. The burst of super-heated air tore the rotor blades from Marine One, sending the helicopter tumbling toward the ground a few miles up the Potomac River, the shattered fuselage crashing against the rocky shore. Advanced engineering saved the president from instant death, the crash-resistant steel frame around the presidential cabin absorbing most of the shock. Baffles braced the occupants against the impact, while foam-filled fuel tanks negated the post-impact fire.

Still, it wasn’t enough. Twenty-five gs of impact tore the cabin apart, ripping the president from his seat belt and sending him through the air to crash against the cabin wall.

Another Secret Service helicopter, half a mile ahead of Marine One and protected behind a rocky bluff along the river, had circled back to the crash site. The agents had pulled the president from the wreckage and evacuated him to Raven Rock.

But they were too late. By the time the president’s stretcher rolled into the compound, he was just a few minutes from death. Too much damage had been done. His heart was in the process of rupturing, the left aorta beginning to tear away from the left ventricle, his chest filling with blood, the pressure compressing his lungs. One by one, his organs were beginning to shut down, his blood pressure cascading with each beat of his torn heart. His breath grew shallow in his chest. His lips were turning blue, and his face was ashen.

Yet he fought the falling darkness, concentrating all of the power and emotion that had carried him to become the most powerful man on earth on simply taking another breath.

Still, the heavy blanket of darkness kept falling.

He cursed the fading light.

No! Not now! Not this way! He yelled to himself.

The darkness grew heavy.

Still, he forced himself to breathe.

He forced himself to think.

He forced himself to live.

But with each breath, he felt shallower, more peaceful, more filled with light… .

He imagined himself walking, his feet stumbling over sharp and jagged rocks. Just a few paces ahead, he saw the soft moss and wet grass. Then a cliff, with a bright blue sky stretched beyond it. He kept on walking. The ground grew marshy, his steps soft and light. The rocky edge. He stepped toward it. No more pain. No more anguish. No more disappointment or regret.

Relief was right there before him, at the edge of the cliff.

He took another step and then stopped. Hesitating, he turned around.

It cannot end like this! he screamed inside himself.

He would not pass away, stepping over the cliff. Not with his nation wounded, bent and bloodied and brought to its knees. He had sworn a sacred duty, and his work was not yet done.

So he took another breath, then turned away and forced himself to walk back.

*******

The president choked and the military doctor leaned toward him. Turning the president on his left side, the physician cleared the airway and then gently laid him back down. The president reached up and took the doctor’s hand, the doctor returning his desperate grasp.

The physician watched the president very closely. He had been in combat. He had watched others die. He had seen the look before: the desperate face, the moving lips, the fluttering eyelids fighting to keep the light. And he knew what was going on inside the blood-stained head.

He watched the dying president, his heart racing in his chest.

The physician had heard unspeakable things pass through dying men’s lips. So he braced himself as the president tried to talk.

Could they trust a dying man to make the most important decisions a president had ever made? Could they trust a dying man to do the right thing against the greatest crisis the nation had ever faced?

A new fear grew inside him as the president began to whisper through clenched teeth.

*******

“Tell me what you’ve learned,” the president gasped to the army general who was kneeling at his side. The four-star general told him what he could. “There was a nuclear detonation over D.C.,” he started. “It’s very early, sir. We don’t really know what’s going on.”

“Who did it?” the president demanded.

“We don’t know, sir. We know the warhead wasn’t delivered by a missile, but that’s about all we have. It could have been a ground package, a small watercraft coming up the Chesapeake Bay, inside a private aircraft—”

“Who did it?”

The general shook his head. “Sir, we don’t know—”

“Find out. You understand me?” The president’s fist tightened up.

“We will, sir. We think we have enough information in our database to track the fingerprint of the uranium explosion to its source, but it might take a couple of days—”

“Where is Caddy Johnston?” the president demanded, looking for the vice president.

“Again, sir, we don’t know.” The four-star general’s voice fell into a whisper. Far too many don’t knows. “There has been no contact with him or anyone from his office. We are thinking—”

“Who is left? Who will be in charge here?”

“Sir, we are trying to establish communications with your offices in D.C.”

“Will you be in command, then?” the president hissed, using every ounce of breath.

The protocol for the chain of command inside Raven Rock was very well established. And yes, besides the president, with no other civilian authorities in the mountain, the four-star general was in charge.

The general finally answered. “Sir, if you should become incapacitated, I would be in command of Raven Rock.” It was clear from the pain on his face that the general wished that wasn’t true.

The president lifted his head, forcing himself toward the general while pulling desperately on his hand. “Don’t you let them get away with this!” he breathed. “You understand me, General Hewitt? Don’t let this go unanswered. I’m dying, that is obvious, but I am of sound will and mind, and I’m ordering you, as your president, to retaliate. I’m initiating a WhiteWolf. Do you understand?”

The general nodded slowly. “I understand,” he said.

“Say it to me, General Hewitt. I want to hear you say the words.”

The general hesitated, glancing anxiously over his shoulder to the other officers and civilian officials standing near. “You are initiating war plan WhiteWolf,” he repeated after turning back to the president.

The president struggled to pull himself into a sitting position, a trickle of red drool forming at the corner of his mouth. He glanced past the commanding general to the other nearest officer, a female captain who was the army general’s aide-de-camp. “You copy that?” he demanded. “I said WhiteWolf. Understand?”

The captain nodded slowly. “WhiteWolf,” she repeated.

The president fell back, his lungs deflating as he rested on the pillow once again. Then he slowly closed his eyes, his face relaxing with relief.

The doctor watched him, almost crying with desperation and despair.

A dying man had spoken. He was still the president, and they had their orders. Now there wasn’t any choice.

TWO

Minutes after the president took his last breath, Hewitt moved into the Command Center, followed by several military aides. The Command Center was high-ceilinged and semi-dark, damp, almost moldy, cave-like, and chilly because of the cold rock and the cooling systems designed to protect the multimillion-dollar computer systems that had been jammed into every square foot of available space.

Built in 1956, rebuilt in 1974, the underground emergency command post known as Raven Rock had been neglected as the Cold War wound down, and then had been upgraded seriously after the 9/11 attacks.

With a full-time staff of three hundred fifty people, including representatives from all major military commands, enough room for two thousand six hundred more (most of them bunked four to a room), seven hundred thousand square feet of underground office space, a secret tunnel that connected the underground command post to Camp David (which was only a few miles away), a thirty-ton blast door, air vents hidden deep in the woods, a gym, a television and media studio, five hundred thousand gallons of purified water, a small hospital and pharmacy—pre-stocked with every known prescription currently being taken by all of the senior senators, representatives, military advisers, and presidential aides—Raven Rock was capable of administering the continuity of the U.S. government without coming up for air.

Adequate, but all business, the amenities inside the underground command post were sparse. Fake windows with landscapes had been painted on a few of the cement walls, and the lighting in the hallways was adjusted on a twenty-four-hour cycle to simulate the rising and setting of the sun. Small, cramped, and bleak, the quarters had perpetually damp floors, and the constant hum of equipment and computers permeated the air.

A private conference room had been built at the back of the Command Center. The darkened glass was soundproof as well as bulletproof, though no one understood exactly why. The four-star army general marched into the room, where he found most of the senior staff. “Anything from the Pentagon?” he demanded.

“We’ve established com with the Command Center underneath the Pentagon,” the director of communications answered quickly. “Colonel Jackson is the duty officer today, but he’s the most senior member that we have so far.”

“You’re kidding?” the general shot back.

“No sir. The Pentagon command post had less than three minutes’ warning. The evacuation plan was under way but there was some confusion regarding whether it was a Blackjack, which would have ordered the senior Pentagon staff into the command post, or a Swordfish, which would have ordered the evacuation of the premises. At any rate, it wouldn’t have mattered; most of the members of the Chiefs of Staff were already at the White House for the weekly briefing.”

The general lifted his hand. “And the vice president?” he questioned. His voice was low and absurdly calm. Devoid of emotion, he was rolling through the checklist, stone-cold and expressionless, not really feeling or thinking anymore.

He knew the procedures. He had drilled this a dozen times in his career. Then suddenly, despite his low voice and stony expression, something deep inside him started screaming, This can’t be real!

The communications officer, a marine captain who was in his mid-twenties but looked like he was getting ready for his junior prom, shook his head. “Nothing from the vice president’s office, sir, but every indication is that he is dead. Like the president, he was in a motorcade on the streets in D.C. when we received the warning. We got the president out on the choppers, but the vice president headed back to the Situation Room at the White House. It looks like he might have been above surface when it happened.” The officer nodded to the aerial footage of downtown D.C. that was being flashed into the Command Center from the military satellite, allowing the blackness and carnage to finish the thought for him.

“Anyone from Congress? The White House Situation Room?”

“The White House Situation Room is just coming on line, sir. The NSA is not there. Colonel Brighton didn’t make it either, sir. Last report, he was still at his desk. He’s the one who called the president and the Pentagon. He saved an unknown number of lives by his actions, at the apparent sacrifice of his own. As far as civilian leadership, we’ve confirmed that Congressman O’Brien and a couple dozen others have been evacuated to Mount Weather—”

“Who in the world is O’Brien?!”

The marine officer glanced down to his cluttered console and his notes. “He’s the third-ranking member of the House Military Appropriations subcommittee.”

The general’s face turned pale. “The third-ranking member… .”

“Actually, sir, he’s the third-ranking minority member. He was en route to Philadelphia—”

The general cut him off. He didn’t care. Some second-term congressman from Topeka wasn’t going to help him right now. “Who else? There must be someone!”

“The line of succession has been cut way, way down the chain. The vice president, the Speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, who would be third in the line of presidential succession—all of them are missing. We can’t presume until we know, but all of them were, you know, in the city at the time.”

“There has to be someone else, some civilian authority that we can turn to?”

“No one at this time, sir.”

The general flinched as if he had taken a punch. Again, his mind was screaming, I must be dreaming! This can’t be real!

He quickly looked around, taking in his staff. The Continuity of Operations Command Center inside Raven Rock had been designed for one purpose, to administer the Continuity of Operations Plan, or COOP, the formal plan for keeping the government operating, even if at only a minimal level, during a time of severe national crisis. Looking around, the general shivered. He had never thought the civilian chain of command would be so severed that he would actually be in charge.

Twenty, maybe thirty, staff members manned the Command Center. Staring into their terrified faces, he realized that he was not alone. Like he, the junior officers and civilian administrators who had been roped into manning Raven Rock—in exchange for the promise of a top-notch job to follow—had never expected to actually see the day when the COOP would be put into place.

Now they seemed so young. All so young.

Or did he seem so old?

Swallowing the wad of dry spit caught at the back of his throat, he turned away. No way was he going to let them see his anguish. No way would he telegraph his despair.

The room was deadly silent, the air purifiers and cooling fans the only sounds he could hear. It was more than thirty seconds before he turned back to his staff. When he did, his gray eyes were expressionless, his face tight and as determined as any soldier’s face should be.

Fine. The Fates had willed it. Ugly as it was, this was his war. He would follow the procedures. He would do what he had been told. If, somewhere up above him, the world was coming to an end, it didn’t matter. Who was dead, who was alive now, time would have to sort it out.

For now he had his orders. Follow the checklist. It was the law. He had no choice.

“All right, people,” he commanded in a booming voice. “At 00:47:34 Zulu, the president of the United States directed a WhiteWolf operation. His orders have been formally confirmed by National Command Authority and my staff.

“We’ve prepared for and war-gamed this for more than fifteen years. You know all the procedures. Now it’s time to get to work.”

*******

The Rules of Engagement, or ROE, for a WhiteWolf were extensive and complicated but unequivocally clear. In part, the war directive read:

CONTINUITY OF OPERATIONS PLAN (COOP) WHITEWOLF

IN THE EVENT OF A:

—DELIBERATE AND HOSTILE NUCLEAR DETONATION OVER THE UNITED STATES, ITS TERRITORIES OR DESIGNATED “SAFE HOUSE ZONES” (see OPPLAN WILMA for definition of possible criteria of designated U.S. Safe House Zones)

AND,

—ONCE PRESIDENTIAL AUTHORITY HAS INITIATED WHITEWOLF, THEN

—ALL NECESSARY CIVILIAN AND MILITARY ASSETS WILL BE DESIGNATED/ASSIGNED TO DETERMINE, WITHOUT DELAY, THE SOURCE OF THE HOSTILE WEAPON (see OPPLAN OUTBACK for information regarding possible fissionable material tracking and nation coding).

NOTE: WHITEWOLF, by definition, assumes the hostile detonation of a nuclear device by an unknown and/or non-recognizable organization/‌government/nation-state. The initial thrust, and the most critical element, of WHITEWOLF is to aid in the identification of hostile parties by relying on the Nuclear Material Tracking Database (NMTD) so as to promptly and appropriately retaliate.

DURING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF WHITEWOLF, ALL INITIAL EFFORTS MUST BE DIRECTED TOWARD:

(1) PREVENTING FURTHER/SUBSEQUENT ATTACKS;

(2) SECURING NATIONAL BORDERS, TERRITORIES, OVERSEAS MILITARY INSTALLATIONS, LOCATIONS OF NATIONAL INTEREST, STRATEGIC RESOURCES (OVERSEAS FOSSIL FUEL FIELDS, PORT FACILITIES), ETC. (see Appendix 1A-3c for comprehensive list of known strategic assets); AND

(3) WORKING WITH ALLIED NATIONS TO ASSURE MUTUAL SECURITY.

WHILE WORKING WITHIN THE CONFINES OF THE ABOVE, THE NEXT HIGHEST PRIORITY IS TO DETERMINE THE SOURCE OF THE NUCLEAR MATERIALS.

—ONCE THE SOURCE OF THE NUCLEAR MATERIALS USED AGAINST THE UNITED STATES HAS BEEN DETERMINED, WHITEWOLF WILL PROVIDE THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (POTUS) OR THE PRESIDENT’S SUCCESSOR WITH TARGET OPTIONS IN ORDER TO RETALIATE.

NOTE: WHITEWOLF RECOGNIZES THAT, AT THIS POINT, POTUS HAS DETERMINED THAT NUCLEAR RETALIATION IS THE LAST REMAINING OPTION. UNDER THIS ASSUMPTION, THE ATTACK MATRICES (Appendix 1A-3e) WILL HELP TO DETERMINE WHICH MIX OF WEAPONS PLATFORMS AND FACILITIES WILL BE MOST EFFECTIVE… .

*******

The plan, options, directions, summaries, and appendices for WhiteWolf were more than four hundred-pages long, but Hewitt noted that some earlier officer, evidently figuring he could save a little time, had summarized the war plan on his own. Across the front page, he had written:

WAR PLAN WHITEWOLF SUMMARY:

Find out who did it.

Bring their world to an end.

And that was it, in essence. That was WhiteWolf at its core. Use every resource available to the United States to find out who had attacked them, and then retaliate in kind.

So it was that, two hours after the attack on Washington, D.C., as the rest of the nation stumbled through a mixture of hate, shock and dread, scrambling to deal with what appeared to be the loss of their national government, a group of men and women working deep within the underground complex in southern Pennsylvania began to put the pieces in place so that the United States could strike back.

Against whom they were going to retaliate, they didn’t know yet.

It would take them a few days to find out.

Then they would retaliate and kill them.

Because that was the plan.

THREE

Washington, D.C.

Lucifer looked out on the devastation that he had created in Washington, D.C.

He stood alone, his callous face dull and lifeless. Even here, in the nonmortal world, the eyes were still the windows that looked into the soul—and his eyes, once so bright and full of joy, had narrowed to angry slits that boiled from the filth in his being.

The problem was, he knew. He knew, more than anyone, what he had given up.

He would never have a family. He would never hold a child. He would never have the joy of knowing that, despite all the trials of mortal living, he had done the right thing.

He would never feel the peace of knowing that Christ was at his side.

There was no hope. No optimism. No light or sun in his life.

There was nothing left for him but emptiness, pain, misery and hopelessness.

Yet he was alive. Like every other creature, he had no choice but to live.

So he stood alone, always angry, looking out on the putrid world he had made into what it was now.

The smell of smoke from the nuclear explosion over Washington, D.C. hit his nostrils: burning trees, melting steel, scalded flesh, and smoldered clothes. The scent of destruction. His lips turned up at the smell. But there was more, something else, another scent in the air. Like a hyena smelling fear, he sensed the despair that filled the world.

He shuddered with delight.

How he cherished that smell.

The fires were still burning, the smoke thick and black as it billowed in the air. The very land seemed to wail. Portable hospital units had been put up everywhere. Washington, D.C., wasn’t a city any longer, just a collection of hospitals and morgues. Lucifer cracked another smile. What horrible scenes did the men and women inside those hospital rooms endure! Bodies were being piled on the streets, waiting for disposal. And there was more to come. Much more.

Lucifer, the father of pain and lies, looked upon it all and growled. Lifting his hand, he raised his dark chain, swinging it easily. Flashing like a bullwhip, the last link snapped a clap of thunder through the air.

A dark murmur of expectation rose behind him and his angels crowded near. A few of them cowered, having felt the sting of the chain before, but most wanted to be closer to the smell.

He snapped the great chain again and the darkness grew more dense, the sun more distant, the day more dim. The horde of dark angels froze, anticipating another snap of the chain.

Lucifer turned toward his servants, the great chain curling to his feet.

Silence.

Deadly silence.

No one breathed. No one spoke. No one moved.

The tendons in his neck pulled tight as he screeched. Shrill, cold, and piercing, the noise rolled toward the crowd.

To some it sounded like a scream. To some it sounded like a growl. But those few who knew him best recognized it as a laugh.

The bitter angels snorted around him, then added their jeers to the ugly sound.

Royal Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The king lay on top of his bed. The sun was setting now, and the enormous bedroom fell dim as the light faded against the desert sky, the failing sunlight that filtered through the forty-foot windows washing from yellow tint to dark orange to deep red.

Lying there, he shuddered, then sat up suddenly.

He didn’t hear it, but he felt it.

He didn’t see it, but he knew.

He felt the darkness laugh around him. He felt his master’s cry.

Pushing himself from his bed, he reached out for his robe.

His master was in the battle.

So much work yet to do.

FOUR

“And it shall come to pass after this, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophecy: your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”

Joel 2:28

Front Royal, Virginia, Fifty-Three Miles West of Washington, D.C.

Tucked between the rolling mountains, Front Royal was on the north end of the Shenandoah Valley, which was green and fertile, and now full of people as tens of thousands of citizens had fled west, seeking the protection of the mountains, though none of them knew what the valley really had to offer or why they were there. The Appalachian Mountains ran south and west of the small southern town, providing an emotional wall if not any real protection from the devastation in Washington, D.C.

The Shenandoah River ran on the outskirts of the town. From where Sara Brighton stood, she could hear the croaking frogs in the lowlands that fed into the river. It was a beautiful night, and from the balcony of the old hotel she could see the outline of the mountain peaks: dark, tree-filled mounds rising up to meet the light of the moon. Gentle and rolling, not like the Rockies, certainly not like the Alps, the rising shadows around her were still a comforting sight.

Front Royal was a typical western Virginia town, with beautiful old homes; narrow, tree-lined roads; and acres of farms surrounded by spreading hardwood trees. Sara loved reading military history, something she had picked up from her husband, and she knew that at one time the infamous Stonewall Jackson had rolled through Front Royal, completely destroying the village as well as most of the countryside around it. Every town, every building, every farm had been burned to the ground, all to capture and secure the Manassas Gap Railroad and two stone bridges over the Shenandoah River.

Sara looked out on the countryside the general had fought so hard to capture.

Half an hour before, as the sun was just beginning to set, she and Ammon and Luke had lucked upon the rundown hotel at an intersection on Skyline Drive and checked in for the night, paying four times the normal rate for a single room. Ammon and Luke had showered, wolfed some sandwiches from the café across the street, and fallen asleep on the floor, their sleeping bags rolled out against the far wall. Now she stood alone on the hotel balcony, her face bathed in moonlight. Behind her, the hotel door was open and she could hear the twins breathing in their sleep. She listened, finding comfort in the sound, then wrapped her arms around herself.

It was impossible to imagine what had brought them to this place, impossible to understand how much their world had changed. Inside her chest, she moaned, thinking of her husband’s death.

It tore her apart, the fact that there hadn’t been a funeral to note the passing of Neil Brighton’s life. Their pastor back in Washington, D.C. had wanted to hold a special service for him, but Sara wouldn’t allow it. Hundreds of thousands had been lost in the attack; she wasn’t the only widow, her sons the only children who had lost their fathers, and to have a special service for one person simply didn’t seem right.

But the pastor understood the extraordinary role her husband had played. “Sara, I think people appreciate how important Neil was to our nation. I think they understand how vital he was to the president, to our security. I think they understand how hard he worked, the sacrifices he made, the sacrifices of your family. We all know how much you missed him even before… . ” The pastor’s voice trailed off.

“How much I missed him even before he was killed,” Sara completed his sentence for him, her eyes sad and tired.

“I mean that in the most respectful way, Sara. Neil sacrificed his entire life, while he was living and literally at the end, in order to serve his country. But he wasn’t the only one in your family who sacrificed. You, your children, you paid the price, too. I know how often he was gone, the hours that he worked, the burden that he carried. I think I understand.”

Sara watched him, her eyes brimming. “Pastor Willow, I love you, you know that, but I just don’t think you do.”

The pastor hesitated. “May I tell you something?” he asked her.

She thought for a moment, then nodded.

The pastor cleared his throat. “You remember a few years ago, Neil came to me for counsel. He was feeling overwhelmed with his responsibilities, his duty, the time it took, the time he couldn’t be at home. Do you remember that, Sara? Do you remember when he came to see me?”

She raised her eyes and looked at him intently. “Of course,” she said.

The pastor walked toward her and took her trembling hands in his own. “During that time we spent together, the Lord showed me—I think He showed us both—a glimpse of what lay ahead. For a moment I felt the responsibility your husband carried. I don’t know if I can describe it, but for the one brief moment, I shared the burden that Neil felt. I think I had to have that experience so I could give him the counsel that he needed to go forward. So yes, Sara, I think I understand just a little the burden and sacrifices you and your family have endured, which is one of the reasons I would like to have some kind of memorial service for Neil.”

“But we don’t have a,” her voice grew slow here, “a body. Any remains. How can we provide a service without—”

“We can do it, Sara.”

She seemed to think a moment, but the truth was, she had already made up her mind. “No, thank you, Pastor Willow. Thank you for your offer, for your consideration, but I am not the only one who lost a loved one in this tragedy. I couldn’t feel good about it. It just wouldn’t be right.”

So they had joined in a general service at the church for all those who’d been killed.

It was to be the only memorial she would ever have for her husband and the father of her sons.

“Think about how many of the pilgrims left their children or their spouses in watery graves out on the ocean,” she said to Luke and Ammon later that night. “Think about all those settlers to this great nation who lost family members on the plains. They didn’t love their lost ones any less than you or I, yet they didn’t have a funeral service for them. We’re not the first to have to go through this. I guess we’ll be OK.”

“Guess so,” Ammon answered, “but I have to tell you, Mom, I didn’t think it would end up this way.”

Standing on the second-floor balcony of the Front Royal Inn, her arms growing cold, Sara considered the final service. That had been two days ago now. Seemed like two years. Two lifetimes. Too long.

She took a deep breath and held it, smelling the trees and farms, then turned and walked into her hotel room. She knelt, said a short prayer—she had been praying all day and had very little more to say—and climbed into bed, staying on the right side, leaving the other pillow and the left side of the bed for Neil, just as she had done for more than twenty years.

Lying on her back, she stared up at the dark. The blinds were thin and bled some of the lights from the streets, casting distorted squares of yellow against the ceiling and walls. Sara could hear the frogs and swamp sounds through the old windows and thin walls.

She was tired. So tired. She felt like she hadn’t slept in weeks. She closed her eyes. They were so heavy. It felt so good just to lie there, not to have to move, not to have to think. She didn’t have to make a decision, she didn’t have to pretend. For this moment, for right now, she didn’t have to do anything.

Her mind started drifting, thinking of her husband. Funny—she couldn’t quite picture his face. She thought of his smell: soap, shaving cream, Old Spice—there, she had it now, his face, his deep laugh and teasing smile… .

Her eyelids were so heavy… .

All she wanted was to sleep… .

She heard his voice just as clearly as she had ever heard anything in her life.

“Sara, it isn’t over.”

She sat up on the bed.

“Sara, it isn’t over,” she heard him say again.

“Neil,” she whispered softly, her voice catching in her throat.

“Listen to me, Sara.” The voice was low but strong. “I want you to stay right here. Stay here for two more days. Then get up and drive west. You will be shown what to do when it happens.”

“Neil,” Sara called again.

“Stay here, then move west.”

And then the voice was gone.

She sat up on the side of bed, staring at the darkness, then leaned back against the pillow, feeling full and warm. “Neil?” she repeated slowly before drifting off to sleep.

*******

The sun was up and the room was bright when she opened her eyes. She had slept through the night without waking, and she felt fresh and strong. Looking at her covers, which lay almost undisturbed across the bed, she realized she had hardly moved as she slept.

Glancing at the floor, she saw Ammon peering up at her.

“I had a dream, Mom,” he told her.

Sara nodded slowly. “Your father?”

Ammon looked up at the ceiling. “We’re going to stay here,” he said.

“But why?” Sara answered. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Ammon sat up on his sleeping bag and ran his hands through his hair. “Nothing makes sense anymore, Mom. Nothing at all. The only thing that makes any sense is what we know in our hearts. That’s the only way we’ll be led. We can’t look to anyone else right now, not our bishop, not other members. We’re on our own for a while. But remember what the Scriptures say about this day: Some pretty cool things are going to happen to those who will listen to the Spirit. Children will see visions and have dreams.”

Sara swallowed and looked away. “We will stay here, then.” She paused. “Although I have no idea why.”

“There has to be a reason.”

“We will stay here two days.”

“Two days,” Ammon said, then lay back on his sleeping bag again.

*******

Two days later, they paid their bill—Luke was furious at the outrageous cost—packed their bags in the car, and were ready to go.

They waited until the sun was barely visible, its dull light shining down the narrow Shenandoah Valley, the sky blister red from high-altitude smoke and dust. Then they started the car, said a prayer, and turned west.

Ammon drove, the oldest brother, if only by a few minutes. Sara sat in the passenger seat, Luke in the back.

Ammon stole a sideways look toward his mother as he drove. She had been forcing a sense of optimism ever since the attack, straining to make herself smile while reassuringly patting their legs. But he knew. He could see it in her eyes, her body language, the sadness of her mouth. She was hurting, dying with grief, pain and fear. She was so fearful. She felt weighted down with the responsibility of her children in this upside-down world.

Ammon glanced at her again, then reached over for her hand. He took her fingers and squeezed them gently. “Mom, you are strong enough to do this.”

Sara didn’t answer.

Ammon gestured to the back. “Luke is strong enough. I am strong enough, too. We’re going to get through this. I promise you, we will.”

She turned toward him, and for an instant he saw her for what she was, a frightened little girl. “I love you, Mom,” he told her.

She nodded and pressed her lips together. “Thank you, Ammon.”

“It’s going to be OK, Mom. It really is.”

She squeezed his fingers, then pulled her hand back and looked ahead.

Behind them, Luke was reading from a small set of red, military-issue Scripture books that had belonged to his dad, the last thing he had taken from his father’s bedroom dresser before walking out of their house.

Twenty minutes passed in silence. Then, without explanation, Luke started reading aloud, “And Moses said to the people: Fear not: stand and see the great wonders of the Lord, which [H]e will do this day: for the Egyptians, whom you see now, you shall see no more for ever. The Lord will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.”

There was peaceful silence for a moment.

“Fear not. The Lord shall fight for us. We should hold our peace,” Luke repeated.

“Cool,” Luke finally said.

Ammon nodded slowly.

For the first time in a week, Sara’s smile was genuine.

Downtown Chicago, Illinois

Azadeh Ishbel Pahlavi looked out through the dirty windows of the downtown office building, a five-story brownstone off Cage Park and Garfield Boulevard. The carpet under her feet was soiled, the walls cracked, the furniture worn, the wooden desks cluttered with papers and telephones. There were a few pictures hanging haplessly on the wall but very little other decoration or office cheer.

Azadeh, trying her best to fit in, had taken on American fashion and was wearing a black skirt, white sweater, and leather belt. But she also wore a scarf covering most of her beautiful hair. A simple silver chain hung around her neck.

The American woman, a low-ranking member of the organization that had brought her to the United States from Iran, seemed friendly, but Azadeh didn’t know. She was a stranger, after all, and Azadeh was constantly on guard.

Everything around her was so unfamiliar: the smells, the heavy sounds of traffic, the many different colored faces, the men who weren’t afraid to stare, the towering buildings, the food, even the tacky feeling in the air.

She truly was a stranger in a strange land.

A crushing wave of homesickness welled inside her. She missed her village. She missed her father. She missed her people and her home. She missed speaking Farsi, the eloquent words and velvet sounds of her native tongue. She missed the food, the great mountain that towered over her village, the peaceful wail as they were called to prayer, the woolen prayer rugs, the dark eyes of little children watching the ayatollahs rise to speak. She missed it all, and, listening to the strange sounds that emitted all around her, she felt her heart begin to tear.

She tried to fight the feeling, but it seemed her faith was set to fail.

She thought of the short walk she had just completed along the sidewalk in Chicago, the angry stares and hurtful words. She did not know the words, but the sound of cursing was universal, and she knew that the hateful expressions had been directed at her. The Americans, perhaps warm and welcoming in another time and place, definitely had their ideas of Muslims now. The fact that she was Persian, the fact that she was fleeing an oppressive regime, the fact that she was a victim, the same as they were, did not matter.

She felt a single tear begin to well and quickly wiped it away. She didn’t want to start crying now, not after all she’d been through. She wasn’t about to let it out. Not here and not now.

She took a breath and held it, fighting the homesickness. Then she forced herself to smile.

*******

Balaam stood beside the young woman, whispering his evil thoughts into her mind. His voice was soft, smooth and tempting as he tried to draw her in. He had learned she wouldn’t listen if he screamed, so he talked tenderly, gently, his voice like dry honey, sweet but slightly grainy against her ears.

Azadeh was a trophy. He wanted her so badly he could hardly look at her. So he gave his best effort, concentrating all his skill. “They hate you,” he whispered softly. “They will always hate you. They’ll never forgive your people for what they have done!”

“But it wasn’t my people,” Azadeh countered in her mind.

Balaam kept his logic simple, his entreaties understandable, even reasonable. “It doesn’t matter. They are not smart enough to know the difference. All they see is the color of your skin and the darkness of your eyes. To them, you people are the same now, and they hate you all the same.”

Azadeh hesitated, her eyes falling to the floor. The woman from the rescue agency stared at her, her smile deceptively bright. Reaching out, she placed her hand on Azadeh’s shoulder, but the girl drew back instinctively.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked her. “You look like you might not be feeling well.”

Azadeh looked up with uncertain eyes. The woman spoke so quickly. All a jumble. All confusing. Why did they all talk so fast? It was impossible for Azadeh to understand them. She shook her head in despair. Yes, the woman appeared to be friendly, but Azadeh didn’t know—lots of people came across as friendly when they wanted something from you. And everyone wanted something. Everyone had an agenda.

“So does she!” the thoughts continued in her head. “The world is full of enemies. Haven’t you learned anything? You are completely friendless here.”

*******

Lucifer stood beside Balaam, observing his work. Lucifer wasn’t a genius, even he knew that. (If he was so smart, how could things have turned out so poorly for him?) But he was old now, and experienced, and he had mastered his tragedies to a perfect art. He was a raging wolf with bloody teeth—there was no heart he wouldn’t shatter, no lie he wouldn’t tell to bring these mortals down—but he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, soft, inviting and so easy to believe. Seven thousand years of practice had shown him that such subtlety was the only way that some of the mortals, especially the young and innocent, would let him get close enough to really get inside their hearts.

“We have to do more than simply tempt them!” he often shouted to his flock. “Many times you can do far greater damage by whispering discouragements in their ears.”

“Why, God, if You love me, have you not blessed me when I needed you so? Why have You denied me the one thing that I need most?”

“Why, God, if I am worthy, do I continue to fail? I have done everything that I could think of, everything in my power, and yet I continue falling short.”

“Why should I trust You? Why should I even try anymore?”

“I am not worthy of this blessing.”

“I am not worthy of Your love.”

“These were the lies that you must tell them! These are the deceits that they must hear!”

*******

Remembering Lucifer’s words, Balaam glanced anxiously toward him, then leaned toward Azadeh and kept whispering in her ear.

“This woman doesn’t care about you. She might pretend, but it’s not real.”

Azadeh looked around, confused. No, that couldn’t be. The woman seemed so nice.

“Don’t believe it, you fool. Do you really think she wants to help you?”

Azadeh took a step back, looking around the cluttered office. Everything was so unfamiliar, so uncomfortable.

“This will never be your home. No one here will ever care about you. The last person who ever loved you was your father, and your father is dead. You are alone now, by yourself, and you will never have a friend!”

Azadeh shook, fighting the depressing thoughts in her head. “No, it will work out. I have my faith. I have my dreams.”

“No!” the angry voice hissed. “You will never feel at home here. You will never be happy. You will never feel joy again.”

Balaam circled around her, his lips pulled down in a frown, his dark eyes glaring at her as he hissed from ear to ear. Then he stepped in front of her and stared into her face, taking in the long hair and slender arms. He hated all her beauty and the light inside her soul. He could see it. He could feel it. And it made him hate her more.

He had been waiting for these young ones for more than seven thousand years. He hated them. And the only thing he wanted was to reach up from his pit and pull them down into despair.

So he leaned toward the young woman and continued talking in her ear. “They will always hate you. You will never be happy.”

He ranted on and on.

Lucifer smiled at Balaam as he listened. When it came to words of gloom and discouragement, this dark angel was pretty adept. Not all of the mortals would listen to such thoughts, but many of them would.

Staring at her, Lucifer had to wonder.

Would Azadeh listen to his angels? Could they drag her into despair?

FIVE

The United States ramped up for war.

There was no way the country would sustain a nuclear attack on its capital and do nothing about it. How could a quarter of a million people be killed, half a million left sick or wounded, a million more displaced, most without home or shelter, and the world not expect the United States to respond?

The secretary of state eventually made it to Raven Rock. A few other cabinet members followed, then a couple of senior members of Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sitting around the large conference table at the back of the Command Center, the remaining members of the government heard the cries for revenge.

They knew they had to act.

As a formal policy, retaliation didn’t make a lot of sense. By definition, it happened after the policy of deterrence had already failed, and it lost a lot of punch with the policy makers who were far more focused on preventing the attack in the first place than in going after blood sometime after the fact. But as a practical matter, in the real world of human emotion, which is where the most critical decisions of nation-states have always been made, the thirst for blood was simply too powerful to ignore.

The first thing the acting president did—a man who just a few days before was the secretary of state—was to order all U.S. forces overseas to return to the United States. The military began to withdraw. From the Middle East, Southern Asia, Europe and the horn of Africa, the United States pulled back its troops. In the greatest military redeployment ever undertaken, thousands of aircraft, military as well as commandeered civilian airliners, began crossing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, ferrying U.S. troops and their equipment home.

The world watched in amazement, almost holding its breath.

Why was the United States pulling back from the fight?

To most, the answer was obvious.

*******

Once the redeployment of the U.S. military forces was under way, the Raven Rock commanders turned their attention to the Office of Nuclear Forensics.

The key to a successful WhiteWolf operation was to properly identify who had attacked the United States. The organization tasked to do this was located in central Maryland. Small and little known, the Office of Nuclear Forensics (“ONF”) was suddenly the most important intelligence unit in the world.

Millions of people would live or die, depending on what ONF found.

*******

By 2004, the Central Intelligence Agency was a broken organization desperately looking for redemption. It had been roundly thrashed for failing to prevent the September 11 attacks.

In the following years, the CIA faced an even more critical issue over nuclear proliferation. However, the CIA quickly realized that nuclear forensics—the science of identifying and tracing the unique signatures of nuclear materials to their production sources—could provide the key to preventing a nuclear weapon from being transferred to a terrorist organization or hostile nation. Knowing that weapons-grade enrichment processes differ from one facility to another, nuclear forensic scientists believed they could identify the radioactive fingerprints left behind from a nuclear attack, in much the same way as it was possible to identify the perpetrator of a crime based on DNA evidence.

A small ONF, code-named Snapper, was set up and tasked with the nearly impossible job to successfully sample, define, identify, and isolate the unique characteristics of any nuclear material produced by a hostile government.

Russia and all of its former republics, China, Iran, North Korea, and later Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Afghanistan, were suspects added to the list of targeted governments from which Snapper tried to collect samples of nuclear material. It proved extremely difficult, and in some cases impossible, to collect viable samples from all of the sites, for Snapper had to rely on human intelligence, such as foreign agents and spies, to get the job done. Still, the working group was remarkably successful. Once a sample had been collected, the nuclear forensic specialists began the painstaking and time-consuming process of identifying and coding the fissile material, making it impossible for that foreign government, at least, to become an anonymous dealer of nuclear-weapons-grade material or nuclear bombs.

After the nuclear detonation over Washington, D.C., the small group of scientists inside Snapper worked twenty-four hours a day. Air and ground samples had to be taken from the bomb site, the material had to be broken down and analyzed, coded, and then matched to the existing database. The supercomputers, some of the most powerful in the world, spun through the computations, a billion calculations every second.

When they got their initial results, the director of Snapper shook his head in disbelief. “Do it again,” he demanded. “That can’t be right.”

“We think it’s right, sir,” his subordinates answered confidently.

“Do it again. I’ll give you another day.”

“Another day?! We need another week!”

“You have another day! I want the answer. Get to work!”

Back to the site of the destruction. More samples taken. More frantic work. Thirty hours later, they had the same results. There was absolutely no question where the bomb material had come from.

The scientists took it again to their boss, then stood back and watched as another shock wave blew through Raven Rock.

The nuclear weapon detonated over Washington, D.C., hadn’t come from North Korea or Iran or Syria or any one of half a dozen countries the United States would have willingly bombed back to the Middle Ages.

The bomb that destroyed Washington, D.C., had come from Pakistan.

Pakistan. The nation’s closest ally in Central Asia.

Not Jordan, not Tajikistan, not any of the former Soviet states.

Pakistan. The only nuclear power in the region with a pro-West and democratically elected (if only barely) government.

Pakistan. One of the United States’ only friends.

The brains inside Raven Rock realized that though a group within the Pakistani government may have provided the weapon, they couldn’t have acted alone. And the Americans weren’t completely clueless as to what had been going on. For years the CIA had been tracking the Pakistani scientist who had been working with one of the princes from the House of Saud.

Although they couldn’t prove it, they were certain the attack had been coordinated and financed by the new king of Saudi Arabia. He had, after all, called General Brighton and warned him. Then, just seconds before he had been evaporated in a nuclear puff of smoke, the general had called the NSA as well.

So, though the United States wasn’t talking, they had what they needed to know.

And the new Saudi king surely had more weapons. This was not the end of his game.

Twenty-four hours after Snapper provided the nation’s new leaders with their results, the orders were given.

Five nuclear warheads were targeted for Riyadh and Islamabad.

Before sending nuclear-tipped warheads from the ICBMs buried in the barren plains of North Dakota, and from the hidden nuclear submarines a hundred miles off the coast of Oman, the provisional government inside Raven Rock warned the nations of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to evacuate their capitals. They would give them three days; then the missiles would fly.

Three days to evacuate their cities.

Just enough time for the rest of the world to go insane.

Israeli satellites watched as Iran began to fuel its long-range missiles. The United States, China, and Japan watched as North Korea did the same thing. India went to the highest level of alert. The entire Middle East sat on the edge of a razor—Hezbollah soldiers moving to the southern Israel border; Hamas (or what was left of them after the previous nuclear attack against Gaza) declaring open war against Israel from the northern Gaza strip; Jordan and Syria forming an alliance and moving most of their military forces into Lebanon and the Golan Heights; Egypt declaring (to everyone’s amazement and despair) that they had developed their own nuclear warhead and would conduct an underground nuclear test; Chechen rebels attacking again in Moscow; twenty million Muslim citizens rioting throughout Western Europe streets.

The list of crisis locations was pages long: a hundred years’ worth of pent-up hatreds, imagined grievances, hostilities, jealousies, and darkening evil bursting like a rotting egg, the poison and decay finally rupturing the fragile shell.

Iran fired first, bent on reaping revenge upon Israel for attacking their fellow Shiite brothers in Gaza. For years the Iranians had threatened to wipe Israel off the map and they knew this would be their best chance to take their shot.

When Israel detected the Iranians preparing their long-range missiles, they launched their own missiles in a preemptive attack. Forty minutes later, the missiles passed each other in suborbital space. The difference between the outcomes was that Israel had spent twenty years and more than five hundred million dollars on a missile shield defense. The Green Pine search-and-fire control radars saw the incoming Iranian missiles. The Citron Tree Battle Management Command and Control Centers targeted each of the seven warheads. High-altitude Arrow missiles destroyed the first four. The three remaining missiles penetrated Israeli airspace. U.S. Patriot missiles went after them once they had descended below fifty kilometers. Two of the remaining nuclear missiles were defeated, leaving only one to get through. Its target was Tel Aviv, but it had been knocked off course, missing the city by almost eight miles.

Tens of thousands of Israelis were killed when the nuclear warhead detonated, but nothing even remotely close to what would have been the death toll if the missile had stayed on track.

Iran, on the other hand, wasn’t so well defended. All of the Israeli missiles reached their targets. The three largest cities inside Iran were gone.

Pakistan, bent on protecting its Muslim brother, began to fuel its missiles. Multiple warheads from India and Israel caught them before they could get in the air.

North Korea was just finishing fueling its missiles when the sky was darkened above the launching pads by sea-launched and air-launched Cruise missiles. All told, more than a hundred conventional missiles destroyed the Korean launch sites, half of them South Korean missiles launched from just across the border. The North Koreans never had a chance, their first-generation launch and delivery systems too slow and cumbersome to compete in the twenty-first century of modern war. All of the launch facilities were destroyed, leaving a few missiles intact in their underground storage facilities but no way to get them in the air.

Then the world seemed to pause, a depressing and dark despair settling from one end of the earth to the other. Blackness filled the air. Nuclear rain fell in the deserts. Ten million people breathed in radioactive oxygen. The sunsets were dark red, almost purple, from the ionized smoke and dust that filled the atmosphere. Was it over? Was it just beginning? How far would it go? Almost a million people had died already. Gaza; Washington, D.C.; Tehran; Isfahan and Shiraz lay in heaps of smoking rubble.

It wasn’t over.

The worst was yet to come.

And there was no way to stop the attack that was heading for the blue waters off eastern and western U.S. shores.

SIX

Twenty-Four Kilometers South of Camp Crush, Southern Iraq

Short and fierce (all of the firefights they had were fierce now), the attack hit Captain Sam Brighton and his team at night, half a kilometer from the mud-and-brick wall that surrounded the small village.

After sending a false informant to accuse the village of hoarding a cache of weapons, the Syrian and Iranian insurgents had hidden in the desert, burying themselves under tarps and a thin layer of sand and breathing through reeds. There they had waited, knowing the American soldiers would eventually come.

When it came to killing Americans, the insurgents were very patient. A few days buried in the sand was a small price to pay.

Sam and his patrol had approached the tiny village on foot, avoiding the pathway from the main road, knowing it was likely mined. The attackers waited until they had passed, then shed their protective tarps and opened fire. Fortunately, they had waited too long, allowing enough distance between their hiding place and the American soldiers for Sam’s team to drop and find protection below a small ravine.

One enemy team was positioned behind the U.S. patrols, one team on the flank. They revealed themselves as one, breaking cover and opening fire at the same time. Their tactics were effective if not particularly heroic: shoot the Americans with several thousand rounds from AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades lighting up the night, then turn and run.

For the American soldiers, the firefight was like a burst of lightning: sudden, frightening, and intense. One moment they were stalking toward the village, three to five meters apart, hidden by the darkness, moving silently across the sand; the next moment they were in the middle of hell with tracers, bullets and explosions all around.

For Sam, the battle came in a fury of dizzying sound and speed. Explosions. Flashes of light. Heat and compression. Calls from his buddies. A quick roll across the sand. Another punch of compressed air in his ears and chest. Screams beside him. One of his men going down. The buzz of deadly bullets around him, above him, one between his legs. Falling again, pushing to his knees, rolling toward the ravine, returning fire behind and to the right. Calling in suppression fire from the United States. A-10 fighters providing cover from overhead. The fighters screaming in. Dozens of frantic shadows all around him. Calibrated and careful fire from his team now. One, three, five, six enemies going down. The screams of a dying man beside him. Sulfur, smoke and the smell of vomit in the air. A medic rushing toward the wounded. An AirEvac helicopter on the way.

The enemy fighters started running, their ghostlike images merging into the darkness up ahead.

One of the enemy soldiers nearest to Sam turned, shot one of Sam’s men at point-blank range in the face, then, laughing, turned and ran!

The sound of that guttural and bloodthirsty laughter snapped something inside Sam. In a rage, Sam grabbed his machine gun and pursued the fleeing men. As he ran, the image of the battle began to blur again. Darkness formed around him. He ran hard and fast. The sounds of his buddies echoed far behind him. The ground rose suddenly, the desert becoming rocky, black boulders here and there. Sam kept running, chasing after the enemy soldiers, ignoring the sound of Bono shouting in his earpiece, “SAM, DISENGAGE AND GET BACK HERE! I WANT YOU BACK HERE RIGHT NOW!”

The laughing soldier struggled to keep up with the others, not realizing that Sam was coming after him. Sam looked farther up the hill and saw two more enemy soldiers, twenty meters ahead of the last man, skulking images in his night-vision goggles.

He stopped and estimated the distance between them. Two hundred meters. Maybe seven hundred feet. A long shot, a very long shot, especially in the dark…

One of the men turned back, saw him in the darkness, and fired. Milliseconds later, Sam felt the buzzing rounds of red-hot metal flying past his head. Another shot and then another as the three men turned and fired.

Dropping to his belly, he extended the biped legs from his machine gun’s barrel, took a breath and held it, and then tightened up his aim. More bullets popping into the ground around him. Geysers of spitting sand around his face. An ounce of pressure on the trigger. Another breath. A bead of sweat dropping into his left eye. Another ounce of pressure on the trigger… .

Phaaat, phaaat, phaaat.

The three enemy attackers fell to the ground.

Sam pulled his head away from his machine gun and stared across the barren landscape, studied the rising desert above him. The three attackers didn’t move. Their limp bodies were sprawled at awkward angles across the loose sand. They were dead, he was certain. His seven point sixty-one millimeter rounds—large enough to drop a buffalo—made mincemeat of the attackers.

He rested on his stomach, laying his head against the sand.

He felt so tired. So consumed. So empty and thin. A long moment passed. He didn’t stand. He didn’t move. The darkness grew around him. Thoughts were swimming in his head. A crushing moment of loneliness fell upon him. He’d never felt this way before. Confusion, bitter disappointment, and a sadness so deep he thought it would crush his very soul.

His mind swirled. His heart raced. He rolled onto his back, overcome, his eyes misting, his nose wet. He thought of the death of the man who had become his father, General Brighton. His birth mother, where was she? Snorting drugs in Atlantic City? Out in Las Vegas again? He thought of his adoptive mother and his brothers. Sara Brighton and her family were the best thing that had ever come into his life. Simply the best. Nothing else was even close. Where were they? Were Sara, Luke, and Ammon still alive? The entire city of Washington, D.C., two hundred thousand people, burned and dead. He thought of the Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis and Syrians. None of them would have freedom. Freedom would never come to them. It was all coming down. It was falling apart. Everything they had fought and died for, everything every U.S. soldier who’d been hurt or killed for, the families who had suffered, the children without fathers, widowed women, mothers without sons, everything they had suffered… .

All of it for nothing.

All of it was gone.

He took a breath, his shoulders shaking. Then he did something he had not done since he was a child, not since the first night with the Brighton family when he had hidden his head between the pillows and begged God to let him stay.

He took a deep breath and started weeping, the emotion spilling out in gulping sobs.

All of it for nothing.

All the sacrifices washed away.

He tried to hold it in, but he couldn’t, it was just too powerful. So he cried, alone in the desert, his shoulders heaving. He struggled and he fought it, but it gushed out all the same. His face was wet with tears and sweat, the sand gritty against his cheeks, the salty teardrops rolling downward to sting the corners of his mouth.

He gulped the air. He cursed and swore.

And kept on crying like a child.

Royal Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

King Al-Rahman paced, his face contorted in rage. “That idiot Iranian should have waited,” he hissed. “We could have done it together. We could have taken the Jews down. But no, he wouldn’t listen! He wanted the glory of killing all the Jews himself. He lost three of his cities! And the Jews, not one! He should have waited. He should have listened. What a stupid, stupid man!”

The old man didn’t react. That a million people were dead was not a big thing to him.

The young king watched him, expecting some reaction, paced again, then fell silent, standing in front of the old man. The old man looked at him, his eyes cold and wet and bleary. His nostrils flared as he breathed.

“The United States is getting ready to attack us,” the king muttered bitterly. “They’ve warned us to evacuate our cities. But they’ll never get that far.”

“No, they won’t, King Abdullah. You have the power to destroy them. I suggest you use it now.”

The king looked away and blinked. “The United States is still a very powerful nation,” trying to mask his hesitation.

But the old man sensed his timid heart. He hated the vacillation more than anything. His face flushed with rage. “Do you finally understand why we have to do this?” he demanded, his voice low and mean. He hated being the instructor, always taking the lead. Didn’t any of these idiots have the capability to think?

King Al-Rahman stood in front of him, his eyes low. It was getting harder and harder to look at his friend. The old man’s skin had become so translucent that one could see the veins in his cheeks, and his eyes had grown so filmy that they almost looked dead.

The king didn’t know who or what the old man was anymore. He didn’t know where he had come from or why he had been chosen by him. All he knew was that he had to follow, regardless of where he was led. He had made his decision to be the man’s servant a long time ago.

The old man waited, his thin lips pressed together, his eyes boring through the pupil who was so slow to comprehend. “Do you get it?” he prodded angrily. “I want to know you understand.”

King Al-Rahman was a proud man, tall and handsome, with dark skin and black eyes. He could walk into a room of world leaders and in minutes have them all eating out of his hand. But all of that slipped away when he was with the old man. And every time they were together, his groveling seemed to grow more and more pitiful, the old man extending his influence to the depths of his soul, twisting and turning the very breath out of him.

Al-Rahman turned away, unable to look the old man in the eyes. “I understand you want me to do this, and that is good enough, my friend.”

The old man nodded slowly. “Yes, it is good enough. But I want to know if I can trust you. I want to know what you understand.”

The king took a breath, his voice uncertain. “We must destroy them because they are the Great Satan—”

The old man lurched out of his seat and rushed toward the king with frightening speed. Getting right in Al-Rahman’s face, he exhaled a foul breath. “Don’t give me that!” he screamed. “You know, King Abdullah, who the Great Satan really is! You know the Master Deceiver; you have felt him in your heart. You know him. You have loved him. He is now your only friend. So get past all the stupidity and tell me if you can! If you can’t, then shut up and listen once again.”

Al-Rahman didn’t answer, his heart thumping, a dew of perspiration forming on his brow. The old man glared, snarled like an animal, then returned to his seat.

“Listen to me, Abdullah.” His voice was softer now. “In a world of lies and deceptions, this is the only truth you have.

“There are three reasons we must do this—three reasons we must destroy the United States.

“First, if we want to deny mankind their freedom, we must destroy the U.S. I don’t understand it,” the old man scoffed and spit, “but the Americans will sacrifice their lives, if necessary, defending the freedom of people they don’t even know. It makes no sense—I know that, no one knows it more than I—but they will fight and die for others, even those who can’t repay them or make them rich.

“That is the first reason we must destroy them. If we do that, we own the world. But as it is, the U.S. continues to be this obnoxious and glaring light on the hill. If we let it shine, the world will continue moving toward it like a moth to a fire. Simply put, we must remove that light before we can control the rest of the world. Once we have destroyed the U.S., we can take our time, toppling the other democracies at our pleasure, for without the U.S. there to guard them, they are helpless as spoiled children.”

Al-Rahman watched the old man, his dry lips spreading to a smile.

“The second thing, my dear king.” The old man jabbed a bony hand toward the west. “The center of His people can be found in the U.S. Yes, their tent is wide, but the center stake is over there. They can’t spread the light if they are holed up in the dark.”

Al-Rahman shook his head. He didn’t understand.

The old man watched, then sniffed. “Forget it. That doesn’t matter. Just trust me, it is important in ways you cannot comprehend.

“Now, the third reason. We must destroy the U.S. before we can take Israel down. If the Americans are around, they will defend it; we’ve seen it time and time again. They are nursing mothers to the Jews, protective fathers to their young. Will another nation step forward to protect them? No. Not a one. Anyone in Europe? Are you kidding! The Europeans now hate the Zionist almost as much as you do. China? Russia? Anyone? I tell you no. There is not a nation on the earth that will defend the Jews except the United States. So we must destroy their mothers before we can destroy the vile seed.

“And remember, King Abdullah, history is absolutely on our side, the side of your people and the Arab nations that you rule. You are the chosen people. Ishmael was the firstborn. Hagar was the first wife to bear. Isaac was a second son and a liar, and his mother was no more. The birthright was stolen from you.” The old man spit in rage. “He’s the one who stole it from you.” He jabbed his finger at some unseen enemy that seemed to linger near. “He stole the ancient birthright from you. He stole it for His son. But it is yours! And you must claim it! The time has come to set it right. Destroy the counterfeit covenant people and we destroy their counterfeit god! But you can’t do that, King Abdullah, until you destroy the U.S.!”

The old man stopped to catch his breath, his eyes burning. He was an animal in a cage, consumed with fear and rage. “Five thousand years we’ve been waiting to wipe His people off the earth. We have a chance to do that now, and you must not let me down!”

Al-Rahman nodded, an overpowering sense of history falling on his soul, a massive weight that seemed to crush him to the center of the earth. No, it was more than just a sense of history—this was much larger and more powerful. A phrase slipped into his mind he had never heard before. He did not understand it, but still the words were clear. “The plans were laid many years before there was even a house of Israel placed on the earth… .”

He faltered, stepping back, almost collapsing from the feel of it in his bones. The plans set in motion were as ancient as the stars. He was at the crossroads of eternal destiny and there was no turning back.

The old man watched him and reached out, placing his hands on the king’s arm. Al-Rahman felt the dark power of his touch and seemed to gain instant strength.

“There is more,” the old man whispered, “a final reason we must act. This is personal, I will admit it, but it’s also the most important reason of all. We’re going to kill them because I hate them. The years have left me full of fury and left them full of light.

“Before they cast me out, I warned them. Now they are in my kingdom, and I will turn their lives into hell. I will center all my hatred on destroying their young faith.”

The old man stopped and wiped the spit that stretched between his dry lips. His voice was low and soft now, and the king struggled to hear it when he said, “That is my final reason, though you will never understand.”

Al-Rahman seemed to shrink at the old man’s last words. “But it is so great an undertaking,” he mumbled in a frightened voice.

“You can do it,” the old man said. “There are others who will join you. You don’t have to work alone. Some will join you for our reasons, some for reasons of their own. Why they join us doesn’t matter, as long as they do what I command.”

SEVEN

Twenty-Four Kilometers South of Camp Crush, Southern Iraq

Sam wiped his tears away.

He finally caught himself, embarrassed at his show of emotion. He pushed himself up into a sitting position on the sand. It was dark. He was exhausted. The firefight and chase up the hill after the enemy soldiers had left him hot and breathless.

The three enemy soldiers about seven hundred feet away from him were dead, he was certain of that, and it bothered him that, unlike U.S. soldiers, their bodies would lie there for days before someone came to claim them—if someone ever did. The air around him still smelled like burnt gunpowder, but he knew it was only the barrel of his carbine. Looking down from the small bluff, he studied the desert below where, minutes before, the firefight had taken place.

The night was cool. Fall was coming on; even in the desert there was some relief. The wind blew from the south, humid and biting with tiny bits of sand.

He was dressed in full battle gear: Kevlar™ helmet, goggles, flak jacket and vest, desert cammies, leather gloves and boots. His weapon, a short-barreled Mk. 48 mod. 0 gas-powered, air-cooled, belt-fed machine gun, was strapped loosely around him, and he had pushed it to his back. The barrel was warm, too warm to be accurate any longer (seven hundred rounds a minute could scorch a barrel in short order), and he wished he had another barrel to change it out. But it probably didn’t matter—all the bad guys were gone or dead. The sky overhead was as bright and clear as only the remote desert sky could be. And it was quiet. Very quiet.

He turned and listened to the wind, then pulled out the tube for the flexible pack of water strapped to his back and took a long drink.

*******

Bono walked toward Sam through the darkness, coming to a stop right in front of him. “Looks like you got ’em,” the lieutenant said, nodding to the three dead men up the hill.

Sam grunted as he brushed the backs of his hands across his cheeks. Had Bono seen him crying, heard his childish sobs? He took a long draw of breath and shuddered in the dark.

Bono turned and sat down beside him. “You OK?’ he asked.

Sam nodded slowly. “It’s all cool, man.”

“It’s OK,” Bono answered, putting his arm around Sam’s back. “It’s OK. You’re OK. No big thing. It comes and goes.”

Sam didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.

The two men sat in silence, the great desert all around them.

“Good work,” Bono said, nodding up the hill again. “I’m glad you got them.”

Sam drank again. “I don’t know, hearing the guy laughing as he ran away. Something about it made me snap.”

“Yeah. Makes you sick, some guy getting his kicks shooting another man in the face. Somebody else ponying out after the bad guys. We need discipline on the fire teams.”

Sam nodded and pulled his night-vision goggles down to cover his eyes.

The sound of the AirEvac helicopter filled the darkness as it landed beside the dusty road. “Who got it?” Sam asked, remembering their men who’d been hit.

“Viskosky,” Bono answered.

“Is he going to be OK?”

“Tore his femur. Ripped the artery out. Lost a bathtub full of blood.”

“Anyone else?”

Bono was quiet and Sam braced himself.

“A couple other minor hits. Nothing serious.” He hesitated another moment. “Hastings was the guy who took it in the face,” he finally said.

Sam shook his head and swore.

Bono nodded toward the hilltop. “That last guy, ol’ smiley there, hid himself near the road. Shot Hastings from point-blank range right in the face.”

Sam nodded sadly. “I saw that,” he said. His emotions were under control now, pushed back deep inside him where it was all comfortable. “Will Viskosky be OK?” he asked.

Bono watched the helicopter landing in the distance, its enormous rotors blowing up swirling vortices of sand in the landing lights. “He’s going to make it. But it hurt him. I like him. He’s a good guy. I guess he’s going home.”

Sam grabbed a fistful of sand and let it sift through his fingers, then lifted his eyes and looked up at the sky. “We all are,” he announced. “They’re pulling us back.”

Bono didn’t answer for a moment. “No surprise there,” he finally said.

“Yeah, it’s been kind of strange, the past couple days. I mean, here we are, pretending nothing happened. A nuke goes off in Gaza. A nuke goes off in D.C. Half of Iran gets hit. Yet for the past week, we keep soldiering on as if nothing’s changed. Keep up our patrols, keep shooting at the bad guys, keep talking to the locals, trying to turn them into friends, when everyone knows it’s all heading south. Another fireball is coming, there’s no doubt about that. The U.S. can’t take a nuke on D.C. and not retaliate.”

Sam fell silent. The south wind kept blowing bits of sand against his face. “It’s going to get ugly,” he murmured, talking to himself more than to Bono.

An orange-red moon broke out behind a small band of high clouds. Looking at it, Sam continued his observations. “Everything we do now is POF. Protection of Forces. Protect our own guys. That’s all anyone is even thinking about anymore. The locals are getting restless and so are the troops. No one wants to state the obvious, but we all understand. Things are going to change. None of these people are our friends any longer. They know what’s coming, they just don’t know when or where. We move here, they move there, but none of it matters. Our mission here is over. We’ve got to get out before it all comes crashing down.”

Bono cleared his throat. “So what now?” he asked.

Sam shook his head sadly. “I don’t know where they’ll send us, but for a while we’re heading back to the States.”

Silence for a moment. “We’re going home?”

“Soon as we can get airlift and transportation.”

“What will we do then?”

“Wait and see, I guess.” Sam pulled his flexible tube from his chest strap and took a long drink, then stood up and extended a hand toward Bono. “Let’s get back to our men.”

EIGHT

Royal Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The enormous palace outside Riyadh was the primary headquarters of the Royal House of Saud. It was a warlike fortress, intimidating, almost evil looking, thick-walled and strong, a structure that provided an impenetrable bastion to the world and guaranteed there wouldn’t be any outside interference in the affairs of the most powerful family on earth. Tall and brown, a little darker than the desert that surrounded it, the castle-palace was situated just a few kilometers from the capital city. One of the few mud-walled fortresses still in existence, the Riyadh palace was a reminder of the caliphs’ greatest days. And it was clearly built for battle. Inverted V-shaped slits were cut above tiny windows in the towers, and the walls were six feet thick. Although it was now surrounded by man-made lakes, green lawns, and a great garden that rivaled the finest in Europe, the palace was still imposing. One look was all it took to know that this was a place for business, a place of power, a place for taking care of the dirty work of the king.

Outside the palace, dozens of the royal children and grandchildren had gathered for a three-day celebration. Between the east wall and the garden, they watched a display of warrior riding and Arab games. Wahab tribesmen from the east pounded drums and chanted in rhythm as veiled dancers swayed to the heart-quickening beat. The soldiers raised their curved swords while the children interlocked their arms and sang:

Allah loves His Prophet

Allah loves His Home

Praise to the King who loves the Prophet

Praise to the land that guards The Stone

Great King, we will defend you

Even as you defend the Prophet’s home

Horsemen spurred their animals viciously through the trees, each of them carrying a flowing silk banner and raising a sword to reenact the charge of the fanatical Ikhwan holy warriors who had swept through Arabia to unite the individual tribes into the Kingdom of Saud. At one time, the Ikhwan were the most fearsome warriors on earth. Zealous, bloodthirsty, fanatical believers in Wahabbi Islam, the Ikhwan were the key to the royal family’s early power.

The children watched the fearsome riders with delight. They danced, ate and laughed among the gardens, oblivious to the fact that the world was shifting right under their feet. For two hundred years the royal family of the House of Saud had ruled Arabia with obscene wealth and unchallenged power. But now that the father-king was dead, and his son King Al-Rahman had stepped into his place, the world was becoming a far more dangerous place.

Especially for these pampered young ones whose fathers had gathered behind the palace walls.

The next generation of royal children would bear the sins of their fathers, and those fathers who wouldn’t sin were just a few hours from death.

*******

There were hundreds of lesser princes—sons of concubines, cousins, nephews, and such—scattered throughout the kingdom, but the eight most powerful princes had gathered in the palace Great Hall. Among the assembled men were the ministers of defense, intelligence and government affairs—the assembled princes who ran virtually every element of Saudi life. Most of them were middle aged, a few were older, none of them were younger than thirty-five. All wore the traditional bisht, a thin black cloak trimmed with gold thread. As they waited for their king, they poured thimbles of bitter cardamom coffee from brass pots. The princes were not used to serving themselves, and a few of them grumbled, not knowing that all the servants had been barred from the entire palace grounds.

Pushing back their white robes and adjusting their checkered head cloths, they talked among themselves in conspiratorial tones. They had assembled, they thought, to map a way forward in the post-nuclear world.

And though they had been brought together for a reason, they were about to find out that it was not for what they thought.

*******

In a small waiting room down the hallway from the great chamber, King Al-Rahman whispered with the old man.

The old man’s hair was white, long and thin, and it fell in a straggle off to the side of his head. His skin was blotched and wrinkled, but his eyes—those fearsome eyes—still burned like coals of red heat. They showed no real warmth or emotion—they didn’t even seem human anymore—but they were hot with rage and the constant burning that emitted from his soul.

“Are you ready?” the old man demanded of the new king.

The younger man nodded grimly. He did not appear excited or in high spirits. Although what he was about to do would consolidate his power beyond that of any single man on earth, he realized it wasn’t that he was elevating his power so much as pulling all rivals down. But he also knew that didn’t matter. The end result would be the same: He would stand atop the pile. Yes, the pile would be made of rubble, but he would stand atop it all the same.

The old man watched and then nodded, reading the passive look on Al-Rahman’s face, knowing the king was beyond feeling now. Ironic, he thought, how the deadening of guilt seemed to kill the whole soul, robbing it of the ability to feel joy as well.

He leaned toward the king, searching for any signs of hesitation. “You will do this?” he demanded.

“I swear that I will.”

“You swear it on our oath?”

“I swear it on my blood. The blood of my father. The blood of us all.”

The old man gestured toward the chamber where the king’s younger brothers were waiting. “You swear it on their blood!”

The king didn’t hesitate. Instead, he moved toward the old man and took him in his arms. Locking his hands behind the old man’s back, he squeezed tight, whispering the cold oaths in his ear.

The old man listened, then stepped back. Staring at the king, he pressed his dry lips in a cynical smile.

The king thought he understood all of the oaths that he had breathed. But the truth was, he didn’t. He hardly understood them at all. He was nothing but a mortal; he could never really know.

But the old man knew. He knew how important it was to hide their counsels from the Light. He knew how much the darkness was needed for their work. He knew that the source of the oaths stretched beyond the boundaries of time.

King Al-Rahman was not the first to share in the oaths and he would not be the last, but like all of the others who had known them, he had an exaggerated expectation of the part he would play. Yes, he was important, but how crucial could one man really be? Like all of the others, he would play his part and then fall away, his body placed in the ground to mold into rot.

Fools! the old man thought in disgust. Arrogant, suffering, self-important fools! They actually thought that they mattered. Short-sighted, condemned fools!

The old man hid his disgust behind a blank face as he studied the king. Was this man worthy? Was he ready? Yes, he thought he was. How many of his family had he already killed? His father. His older brother. His brother’s children and wives. All of them were dead now.

No, that was not right. There was one, a young child, who had escaped.

But they would find him. They had to find him. And they would kill him when they did.

The old man smiled.

It was time to spread the cult. He patted the young king on his shoulder. “You know what to do,” he said.

The king swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing against his tight throat.

The old man leaned toward him, his breath as dry as death. “The final attack, the most powerful devastation, is just a few hours away. You absolutely have to do this before your brothers find out what you’ve done. Some of them will help you. Some of them are like you. Go. Find out which of them are going to join you. Then take care of the rest.”

The king frowned and started walking toward his brothers down the hall. He tried to keep his step up, but his feet still seemed to drag. He felt so empty and lonely, so frustrated and cold. He wanted to get it over with. He was growing weary of this war.

The old man watched, reading the look on his face. He called out, “King Abdullah.”

The king stopped and turned around.

“After this thing against America, you know the next step, don’t you?”

The king stared, his face blank.

“Your filthy half-brothers, all those Shia, they will have to be put in their place. Claiming the authority of Allah when we all know that Ali, their first leader, was nothing more than a filthy liar. They’ve become chaotic and impossible, a pox upon you all. Your job won’t be over until we’ve taken care of them as well.”

The king took a step back. Yes, it was true he hated the Shia; he’d hated them since he was just a child. Every Sunni hated Shia. Ahl al bayt. “People of the house [of the prophet]” was their claim. How insulting! How absurd! All of them were liars and imposters.

But they were also Muslim brothers!

His heart sank again.

“How far—how long will this go on?” he muttered desperately, the hopeless thought escaping his lips before he could call the words back.

The old man considered the question, then smiled a wicked grin. “All the way,” he answered softly. “All the way until the end.”

NINE

East Side, Chicago, Illinois

They stood in the foyer on the first floor of the public housing building, a dreary high-rise identical to the four dozen other buildings around it. A blight on the city for more than three generations, the complex of poverty might have been the pride of some government bureaucrat back when it was built in 1960, but it was nothing but a fester of drugs, violence and criminal activity now.

In the lounge, six men spread out on a pair of stained couches, cooking heroin, playing cards, and calling filthy names to every girl who walked by. One of them tossed a knife, dropping it again and again on the floor, the curved tip sticking through the soiled carpet to the floorboard underneath. Another cleaned his gun, a Saturday Night Special with the serial number filed off. A Chicago Housing Authority security officer stood near the front door. The men seemed to ignore him, and he ignored them as well. A long-standing agreement stood between them: He looked away; they cut him in on the action. Sometimes they paid in cash, sometimes in women.

Almost every night since the nuclear detonation in Washington, D.C., there had been riots in the ghetto, but the police had finally retaken control and the smell of pepper spray had begun to dissipate, though a faint whiff of smoke still drifted in the air. To the men’s right, one of the elevator doors was jammed open—it had been a long time since it had worked—and the other elevator door opened and closed with regularity as it moved the building occupants up and down.

Azadeh Ishbel Pahlavi stood before the older woman. It was the first time in her life she had ever seen a black woman this close, and she couldn’t help but stare at her beautiful skin. The woman’s hair was braided and wrapped in silver beads. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, but they smiled with a dazzle that somehow made Azadeh feel good. Azadeh was taller than the other woman by an inch or two, but both were slender and small-boned. Each of them fidgeted anxiously as they studied each other.

Then, without any apparent reason, the black woman broke into a smile. Leaning toward Azadeh, she pulled her close and held her a moment longer than two strangers would have normally embraced.

Mary Shaye Dupree, the older woman, pulled back. “Welcome, Azadeh,” she said.

Azadeh bowed, an overly dramatic move that bent her almost in half. “Miss Dupree,” she answered, her English almost perfect, at least these few words, for she had practiced the introduction a hundred times. “My name is Azadeh Ishbel Pahlavi. Thank you for inviting me here.”

The woman smiled again, white teeth and full lips. “You call me Mary, or Mary Shaye, but not Miss Dupree, all right?”

Azadeh nodded slowly. “Yes, ma’am,” she said.

“Not ma’am, now. It’s just Mary.”

Azadeh nodded. “Just Mary,” she repeated, her face growing confused.

The black woman laughed, then lifted a small present she held in her hand. “I got this for you, Azadeh. It isn’t much.” She hesitated, gesturing to the crumbling surroundings around her. “I don’t have much, you understand, but I wanted to give you something.”

Azadeh stared at the gift, her eyes growing bright. She had been given a gift only one other time in her entire life and, thinking of the golden headband her father had given her on her eighteenth birthday, she shuddered. She thought of the night on the mountain, the night she had been driven from her home, the rain that turned to snow, the cold, being lost, the hopelessness and despair. She thought of her father and the stranger, and how the precious gift had reappeared. She trembled as she remembered, then turned toward Mary. “For me?” she asked haltingly. “But Miss Dupree—Mary, I don’t have you anything.”

“That’s OK, baby. I didn’t expect you to.”

“For me? You are certain?” Azadeh repeated.

“Yes. For you, baby. But don’t get your hopes up, it isn’t much, all right.”

Azadeh bowed again. “Thank you, Miss Dupree.” She spoke slowly and carefully, struggling to pronounce every word.

Mary Dupree reached out and lifted the young woman, tugging on her shoulders. “You don’t do that,” she told her. “Don’t you bow to me. You’ve got no reason to bow to anyone. You understand me, girl?”

Azadeh nodded, though she didn’t. She didn’t understand at all. Mary Dupree might as well have been asking her to quit breathing as to ask her not to bow. She had been bowing at the waist since she was a little girl. Her father had insisted. It was how it was done. “Persians are gracious people,” he had told her. “We are not too proud to bow.”

She stared blankly at Mary, her mind racing, suddenly confused. “Yes,” was all she answered.

Mary nodded, watching Azadeh’s face closely, then pointed to herself and said, “Mary, OK? You call me Mary. And you don’t bow to me. I’m not your master. I’m your mother now—‍”

Azadeh took a sudden breath. She had never had a mother, not since the day she was born. It was a nice thought, and she appreciated it, but this woman would never be her mother, no matter how she tried.

Mary continued to watch her closely. “I understand,” she said as if she had read Azadeh’s mind. “Maybe not your mother. But that’s OK. I’ll be something. We’ll worry about that later.” She nodded to the present. “Go ahead,” she said.

Azadeh glanced at the small gift. Mary followed her eyes. “Really, it isn’t very much,” she repeated. “I get along, but it isn’t like, you know, the good Lord has blessed me in many ways, but not with a lot of money. I mean, look at this place.” She tilted her head toward her surroundings, the peeled wallpaper, the cracked linoleum, the dirty floor.

Azadeh looked around. “It is beautiful,” she said.

Mary stared, then broke into a smile. Could she be serious? Could this be beautiful to Azadeh? Could this place be that much better than the place she had left?

The look on Azadeh’s face assured her it was.

Oh, girl, Mary thought, where did you come from? What was it like over there? She pressed her lips together, then again nodded to the present. “Open it,” she said.

Azadeh lifted the small package. It was wrapped with plain white typing paper and tied with a small bow made of blue string. She carefully pulled back the paper, taking her time so as not to tear it, then pulled out a small velvet box. Mary smiled as she watched her, almost squealing with anticipation. Azadeh sensed her excitement and started bouncing, moving from one foot to the other.

She flipped the velvet lid open. It contained a small silver ring. No stone or other ornament, just a simple silver band.

Mary lifted her own finger to show an identical ring on her right hand. “Twinners,” she said happily.

Azadeh hesitated. She didn’t understand the word, but she clearly got the meaning. And Mary’s excitement was infectious. Azadeh couldn’t help but laugh. Gently she pulled the ring out of the velvet box, glanced to Mary’s hand to check which finger she wore it on, then pushed the silver ring onto her pinky finger too.

She looked up and smiled. “Thank you,” she said.

Mary nodded, clearly very pleased with herself. “You’re welcome, Azadeh,” she answered, nodding at the open box again.

Azadeh looked down and noticed a piece of paper tucked inside. Lifting it, she unfolded the paper and spread it out. Mary looked away for a quick moment, seemingly embarrassed. “I didn’t do all that good in school,” she said in a soft voice. “It’s not like I’m a famous poet or anything. But sometimes I write. Sometimes it’s the only way I have of expressing myself. I wanted to tell you something and this seemed to be the best way.”

Azadeh looked at the quarter-sheet of paper and started reading slowly. The script was small and written in a delicate hand.

Your mother kissed your soft skin

Before God called her home to rest

Now at night I’ll kiss your forehead

And try to do my best

Because she’s watching from the heavens

Hoping I can fill her part

So I will love you like your mother

And mend your broken heart

Azadeh finished the poem and then just stared at the paper, keeping her face toward the floor. When she looked up, she smiled weakly.

“I know it’s no good,” Mary explained shyly. “I only wrote it last night. I could do better if I had more time. But, I don’t know, it seemed to say what I wanted it to. I just hope you understand.”

Azadeh nodded. “Thank you, Mary.”

Mary nodded. Azadeh smiled again, her dark eyes wide. Looking at her, Mary realized once again how startlingly beautiful she was. She moved toward her, took her by the shoulders, and looked into her face. She studied the dark hair flowing out from under the scarf, then moved her gaze down to the beautiful eyes and soft skin. The oval face. Thin arms and slender fingers. “Oh no, child,” she muttered as she stared. “This isn’t good. Not good at all.” Glancing over her shoulder, she shot a deadly look at the men who were lounging on the filthy couches. “We’re going to have to be careful, Azadeh. Really careful. Understand?”

Once again Azadeh had no idea what she was talking about.

Mary stared at her another moment, then took her by the hand, moved to the elevator, and punched the button for the fifth floor. “Come on,” she said. “Let me show you your new home.”

*******

Mary led Azadeh into the apartment. The young girl carried two worn pieces of luggage—one over her shoulder, the other one in her hand. Together they contained everything she possessed in the world. Reaching toward her, Mary took the bags and placed them on the floor as they passed through the front door.

The apartment was warm and clean. A small window over the kitchen sink looked out on the next high-rise building and a narrow alley five floors below. The furniture was worn and covered in assorted brown fabrics, none of which really matched. The linoleum was clean and slippery from polish, the kitchen chairs chrome with plastic coverings, the kitchen table just large enough for two people. The entire apartment smelled like cinnamon and coffee, and Azadeh drew a deep breath as she walked in.

But there was something else in the air, a smell that seemed faintly familiar though she did not immediately recognize it. A harsher smell, more tart, something like the disinfectants they splashed on everything back at the refugee camp in Khorramshahr. The smell propelled her back, and she stood without moving, her face blank, her eyes suddenly focused in the distance, her mind flashing through the memories: the constant mold and cold at Khorramshahr, the flapping tents, always being hungry, always sick, always coughing, always lonely, having no family, no village, no friends.

But the worst part had been the unending boredom; mind-numbing and spirit-breaking, it had sucked the life out of her like the moisture from a peach left too long in the sun.

Azadeh stood near the front door of the apartment, unaware of her surroundings, swallowed up completely in powerful memories. She thought of her old friend, one of the very few friends she had ever had in her life and certainly the only friend she had made in Khorramshahr. Bânu Pari al-Faruqi was dead now. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she was certain that her Christian friend had finally passed through the Great Veil. And though she grieved for Pari Jan and the illness from which she had died, there was still a softness to her sadness that she couldn’t deny.

She didn’t really understand what the Christians meant when they talked about heaven, but surely Pari’s husband had been there waiting for her. Surely they were together now, after so many years of being apart.

Azadeh had to smile as she thought of her friend, remembering the brightly colored murals Pari had painted on the walls of her tiny wooden hut at Khorramshahr, the flowers she had kept near her window to soak up the sun, the small bushes she had nursed along the muddy path that led to her front door. She was a breath of fresh air in a very stale world, a world that was concerned only with moving people on, one way or another getting them out of the way. Azadeh didn’t know if she would have survived Khorramshahr without Pari. If it hadn’t been for her and the stranger… .

Her memories shifted to the young American who had saved her life. She remembered the first day she had seen him in her burning village, her father’s martyred body behind her, tearstains and mud creating tracks on her cheeks. He had looked at her and smiled, then approached her as he would a wounded animal, softly, holding his hands out, kneeling in the dirt. He was the one who had told her to go to Khorramshahr. Then he had remembered and come to rescue her, risking everything to save her life.

She thought of him all the time now. His face. His kind smile. To her, he was more than a hero. He was, well, he was much more than that.

*******

“Azadeh,” Mary repeated. “Azadeh, are you all right?”

Azadeh shook her head and looked around. “I’m sorry,” she answered quickly.

Mary watched her, then smiled. “I lost you for a moment.”

Azadeh blushed. “I was just thinking—I was just thinking of Khorramshahr.”

“Where?”

“Khorramshahr. The refugee camp. I had a good friend there. I was thinking of her.”

“Would you like to talk about it?”

“About Khorramshahr?”

“Yes, dear.”

“No. No, certainly not. Why would I want to talk about the camp?”

“I don’t know, Azadeh, I just thought—”

“No, ma’am. I do not want to talk about Khorramshahr.” Azadeh moved away. “I am sorry. I do not mean to sound rude. There is not much good to talk about.”

Mary nodded, her expression growing soft. “That’s fine. We don’t have to talk about it. We don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”

Mary moved to the window. From one side, she could look past the corner of the closest building to the city streets below. Traffic was heavy and there was still a hint of smoke in the air. Her neighborhood, her city, the entire world had changed in the past couple of weeks. She drew a deep breath and stood in uncomfortable silence for a moment. “Do you realize how close it was for you?” Mary asked Azadeh as she turned around.

“What do you mean?”

“A few more days and you would never have made it here to the States. How many foreigners from Muslim countries do you think the United States is allowing into our country right now? Not very many, I guarantee you.”

Azadeh nodded slowly, biting her lip.

“After what has happened in the Middle East and Gaza, and now here in the United States, do you have any idea how difficult it would have been for you to get a visa, to get permission to stay here? Virtually impossible. Besides all the political implications, there is chaos everywhere. The government—everything is at a standstill. I know you had been waiting a long time, but I don’t think that would have mattered. Another few days and you would never have made it here.”

Azadeh shrugged her shoulders weakly. “I was very lucky.”

“No, I don’t think it was luck, baby. Things like this don’t happen because of luck or pure chance. There was a reason, I’m certain. There is a reason you were sent here. You may not know what that is, but I promise you, Azadeh, there is a purpose for you being here, in this place. You have a mission. You have a purpose. The good Lord works in mysterious ways, and you are one of his great mysteries, it would seem.”

Azadeh hardly moved. She didn’t know what to say. Truth was she had little idea what Mary was even talking about. Her perception of Allah was that Allah was not overly involved in the affairs of men, certainly not involved on any personal level. It was impossible to imagine that Allah would care about or intercede in the affairs of a single young woman. To her, there was no Father in heaven, certainly no loving God. Allah was powerful and demanding of her loyalty, but that was about all Allah was.

Mary leaned against the counter. “Someone is watching out for you,” she concluded.

Azadeh shrugged again.

Mary waited for an answer, then pointed toward the hall. “I want to show you your bedroom. And there’s someone else you need to meet.”

Azadeh hesitated. “Of course, ma’am,” she said.

“Mary!” Mary pleaded, gently punching Azadeh’s arm.

“Mary,” Azadeh repeated, then started laughing. “I promise, Mary, that is the last time I will make that mistake.”

Mary led Azadeh into the living room. Small and clean, it reminded her of her home back in Iran. They moved down a narrow hallway to the first room on their right. Mary pushed the door back and Azadeh saw a twin-size bed, a freshly painted white bureau with a slightly broken leg, and an empty closet. “This will be your bedroom,” Mary explained. “It is your space, your getaway, if you will. Feel free to do what you want with it. If you want to paint it, wallpaper, whatever, I’ll help in any way I can.”

Azadeh looked around in amazement. “Really?! This is mine?”

“Yes, baby. This is yours.”

“It is,” Azadeh struggled for the words. “It is—very wonderful. It is—too large for me. It is—I am grateful.”

Mary patted her arm. “That’s so great, Azadeh. Believe me, gratitude is a lost art in here in America. But you are too kind. Now, come on. There’s something I need to show you. You may not know this, but it won’t be just you and me living here.”

Azadeh followed Mary back to the small living room. Mary nodded for her to sit down, then took a seat on a small wooden rocker across from the flannel-covered couch. Azadeh sat, her knees bent to the side. The two women were only a few feet from each other, and Azadeh could see Mary’s hands tremble slightly as she rested them in her lap.

“I’m so glad to have you here, Azadeh. Do you know that?”

Azadeh held Mary’s eyes but didn’t answer.

“Do you believe that I’m glad to have you with me?” Mary pressed.

“I think so,” Azadeh finally answered.

Mary pressed her lips and played with one of the silver beads at the end of her tightly braided hair. “It’s all right if you’re not sure. I don’t worry too much about that right now. You’ll know soon enough how I feel. It won’t take long for you to believe me when I tell you that I didn’t agree to take you in for the money that they give me, or because I needed someone to clean the floors. I didn’t do it because I wanted someone to talk to or someone to care for me when I get old. I brought you here because I want to help you. That’s it. Nothing else.”

Azadeh concentrated, her brow furrowed, and Mary realized that she had to speak more carefully if she wanted the girl to understand.

She started again, this time more slowly. “I know that you have been dealt a very hard start in life,” she started.

“Oh, no!” Azadeh answered. “I have been very blessed. Yes, I lost my mother. But my father was wonderful, the most wonderful man in this world. He blessed me. He blessed my life. I have been very happy.”

Mary smiled and edged to the end of her seat, moving closer to Azadeh and reaching out for her hand. “I understand that. I really do. I’ve been told enough about you to understand what a good man your father must have been. But all I want to do is help you. Be your friend. I want us to be a family if we can. I think, in time, you will believe me and know that is true.”

Azadeh watched her a thoughtful moment. “I believe you,” she finally answered.

Mary squeezed her hand. “Thank you.” Looking away, she glanced toward the window, then turned back to Azadeh. “Did you know that I have another daughter?”

Azadeh shook her head.

“She is a special little girl. The love of my heart. When you meet her, you will feel the same, I am certain. Come on. I want to show you.”

Mary pulled on her hand and led her down the hallway to the second bedroom at the end of the hall. Putting her finger to her lips for silence, she slowly pushed the door back.

The smell hit Azadeh in the face. Disinfectant. Medicine. It smelled like the infirmary at Camp Khorramshahr, a smell she would never forget.

The room was dimly lit, the drawn shades allowing just a little light to seep into the room from around the edges of the window. There was a double bed against the far wall, then another mattress placed on the floor beside it. Blankets, medical instruments, and medicines seemed to be everywhere.

A little girl was sleeping on the mattress that had been placed on the floor. Mary moved toward her and knelt down on the mattress. She reached out and lifted the little girl’s hand, but the child didn’t wake or stir. “Hey there, little princess,” Mary said in a soft but cheerful voice.

The child kept on sleeping. Mary sat for a long time, simply holding her hand. Azadeh waited at the doorway, unsure of what to do.

TEN

Eridu, Southeastern Iraq

Lieutenant Bono turned in a slow circle, scanning the desert around him. The sand was brown and as fine as talcum powder. Slow to move, it seemed to paste itself to the bedrock, the oldest sand on earth. Here and there small bluffs of black, craggy rock penetrated the rolling desert, the flinty hunks of lava glinting in the angled sun. From a distance, the bluffs appeared to be covered with dark bushes and low vegetation, but Bono knew that wasn’t true. He knew that as they got closer the dark patches would emerge as small hunks of stone that jutted from the ground, not vegetation. Above his head and to his back, opposite the setting sun, the sky changed color as it rose above the far horizon. Near the ground it was solid white from reflecting off the sand, but it deepened to greenish-silver and then dark blue directly over his head. The sand and rolling mounds (they weren’t high enough for Bono to quite call them hills) seemed to go on forever, and the air was so clear that the details of the dismal landscape didn’t seem to fade, no matter how far off he looked.

Sam stood somewhere behind him, quiet, unseen, and unmoving, but Bono knew he was near. A soldier, especially a soldier who spent much of his time in the desert, developed his senses, and Bono could smell the other man’s leather boots, the detergent on his uniform, the spearmint gum in his pocket, the aftershave he had put on a few days ago.

Bono turned in two full circles, his feet treading lightly across the brown sand, years of moving without leaving a trace instinctive to him now. Then he held still and listened as Sam moved quietly to his side.

“So this is it?” Samuel Brighton shook his head as he looked around in disbelief.

Bono nodded toward the barren desert. “That’s what they say.”

Sam squinted through the setting sun at the utterly barren landscape around him. “What did Adam grow here? Snakes and sand fleas? Help me understand this, Lieutenant, because I’m not so sure you’ve got your geography right.”

Bono hunched his shoulders. “It might have changed a little bit over the years.”

“Changed a bit. Yeah, I guess so.” Sam’s voice was sarcastically light-hearted. “If this was the Garden of Eden, and if this is what it looked like, I’d say Adam got the better end of the deal. Getting tossed out of this hunk of burning sand couldn’t have been the worst thing that happened to him that day.”

Bono smiled but didn’t answer as he continued looking down from the bluff.

It was so quiet he could feel the atmospheric pressure in his ears, the air perfectly calm as evening came on. His neck tingled from a light sweat that evaporated in the rapidly cooling air. The sun was low now, a huge, blood-red ball sinking toward the western horizon. As he watched, it began to fall so quickly its movement was perceptible.

The thought that this land of rock, sand and black scorpions searching desperately for some warm-blooded prey had once been the Garden of Eden was almost laughable. But it really didn’t matter. Bono knew it wasn’t true. “This isn’t it,” he said to Sam after a long pause. “Not literally, I mean, not the Garden of Eden. Yes, it’s true that most scholars and historians believe the Garden had to be somewhere near this place, but we know that’s not the case.”

“Do we?” Sam sounded surprised.

“True, my friend.”

“This isn’t where Adam and Eve strolled among the animals and chomped down a couple apples?”

Bono shook his head and smiled. Sam was on the right track, but his understanding of the gospel still had a long way to go. That was what made him so interesting. He had so little knowledge, but his emerging faith was so strong. It was as if the death of his father had turned on the switch of faith inside.

“No, this isn’t the location of the Garden,” Bono finally repeated.

Sam waited, then turned toward him. “And you know this because… ?”

“It was revealed. So we know.”

“Hmmm,” Sam thought. For the first twenty-some-odd years of his life, he would have thought that that was foolish. But it was enough now. “Where is the real Garden?” he asked.

“America, my bushy-haired friend.”

Sam shook his hair from his eyes. He had the longest hair in the unit now; it hung down past the bottom of his neck. The blond hair had to go—he had dyed it black so as not to stand out—but it still curled and was finer than a Middle-Eastern man’s, and he didn’t quite fit in with the locals around him. Still, it was better than the blond hair that immediately branded him as different.

“America? That makes sense,” he answered after thinking awhile. “Not geographically, I guess, but something in my gut says that is just right. America is the chosen land. Why wouldn’t the Garden be there?”

Bono lifted a hand toward the horizon, pointing south across the short bluff where they stood. “At one time, the sea must have reached up to where we are standing now,” he explained. “The Euphrates and Tigris merged just to the north, then dumped into the Persian Gulf somewhere near here, I would guess. Even if this wasn’t the literal Garden of Eden, it certainly was the cradle of civilization. The fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates—” he shot a look at Sam. “I’m sure you can tell me their Arabic names, can’t you, stud?”

“Dejla and Furat.”

Bono shook his head in disgust. “How do you do that? Come on, man, I can’t remember my wife’s maiden name or how to count to ten in Spanish despite sitting through at least three thousand episodes of Sesame Street as a kid, yet you hear an Arabic word a single time and you can remember it forever!”

Sam smiled, satisfied. It was true. He really could.

“I just don’t get Arabic,” Bono muttered. “It’s like running water through a sieve. The words go in. They flow out. I can’t remember anything.”

“Hey, you got a beautiful wife and great aim. It wouldn’t be fair if you got everything.”

“Still, I don’t know how you do it.”

Sam shrugged. “It just comes. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Bono cocked an eyebrow. “But you can’t remember any history?”

“Dead people and lost cities. Not my thing, I guess.”

Bono swatted at a circle of biting sand flies that hovered above his head, then continued his instruction, even though he knew that Sam wouldn’t remember and really didn’t care. “This place gave birth, if not to Adam, certainly to the first cities and civilizations of man. Nimrod, the great hunter mentioned in Genesis, was the founder of Nineveh, the capital of ancient Assyria, which was up on the Tigris north of here. And Nineveh wasn’t some insignificant desert village. It was a massive city, taking three days to walk around. An entire library of clay books was found there, probably the oldest on earth. Jonah, of course, preached in Nineveh. He was a funny guy, ol’ Jonah. Got all ticked off when the entire city repented and was saved. Wanted to see some falling meteors and blazing fireworks, I guess.” Bono pointed slightly west. “Babylon, the most famous ancient city in the world, was the capital of ten Mesopotamian dynasties starting almost four thousand years ago. Of course, Nebuchadnezzar built his amazing cities on the backs of his slaves, many of them Jews. Muslims believe Noah—they call him the second father of people—lived in Fara, which is just north of here. Azra lived in Auzayr, Hizkael in El-Kifl.”

Sam listened, watching Bono as he moved his finger across the horizon, pointing at different spots in the desert that looked identical to Sam. Sand. Low bluffs. Lifeless dunes. Nothing else.

Bono turned east. “Ur of the Chaldees is out there, birthplace of Abraham. It was a spectacular city until the Euphrates changed its course, leaving it to shrivel in the desert, suffering a slow but certain death.”

Bono quit talking and wiped a dark sleeve across his brow. “I know it looks barren—”

“Barren?!” Sam interrupted. “That’s a pretty generous description, I’d say. Barren indicates a happenstance lack of life. This desert is one step beyond that. It seems to be sterile, as if a great cosmic hand had intentionally wiped away every form of life.”

“Maybe,” Bono answered slowly, “but there is still beauty here. The openness. The endless sky. The heat turning the sand into shimmering waves. The horizon that glitters in the distance. The colors of silver and dark blue overhead. The deep quiet. The clean air. It’s really beautiful.”

Sam looked around and nodded slowly. The wind shifted and, behind them now, they could hear human voices as the man-made sounds of clicking metal and gas-powered generators signaled their base camp’s coming to life.

The American soldiers, a small group of elite Cherokees, were tearing down their camp, getting ready to bug out. Sam turned, knowing this would be the last time he would see the base camp in the light. By morning, they would be gone. He studied the camp. Three kilometers south of them, the ancient town of Eridu jutted up against the desert sky. Forty meters to his right was a double strand of razor-wire fence—behind that, a small minefield, then another double strand of wire. Unseen guards watched the perimeter of the base camp from various buried locations. Humvees and the other machines that the men used to kill the enemy were tucked away at the center of the camp. There were no tents, only bunkers, and the camp was set back twenty-four hundred meters from the main road, just beyond the range of the insurgents’ most powerful rocket-propelled grenades. An unpaved trail, heavily barricaded, made its way through the desert from the highway to the camp.

The evening light began to fade, turning dull yellow and then hazy orange as the sun disappeared. The two men sat down, resting on the warm sand. “You heard about Rodriguez?” Bono asked.

Sam closed his eyes and didn’t answer. Months before, a scout patrol from their old Ranger unit had been hit by a roadside incendiary bomb. Both Sam and Bono knew the men who had been injured; all of them were close friends. Mercilessly, all four men inside the Humvee had been severely burned. No more hair. No more skin. No more eyes. Over time, months of agony and anguish, each of the men had slowly died. The first to pass away, a young lieutenant, had been the lucky one—he had lived only a few weeks. One man lived for three months. Another for more than six. All four men were now gone, Rodriguez being the last man to give up the final fight, a little more than nine months after the explosion had burned him from head to toe.

It sickened Sam to think about them. Nine months of battle. Nine months of anguish and pain. “Please, just kill me,” he mumbled as he considered the horrible fate of the men.

Bono heard him and nodded. “Yeah. I’m with you.”

Sam ground his teeth.

“Rodriguez was what, twenty-one?” Bono asked.

“Yeah.” Sam took a deep breath as he answered. Twenty-one was barely old enough to marry. It was too young to die. Then he thought of his father, General Brighton, who had also been too young to die.

He thought of the pictures he had seen of Washington, D.C., after the nuclear detonation. Charred buildings. Hunks of burned concrete, the oil boiled from the blacktop on the streets. A few scattered trees, black and lifeless, nothing more than dead trunks and drooping branches that looked like witches’ hands reaching up from the ground. The spot where the White House had once stood had been identified, but there was nothing there. Four days had passed now and he knew that his adopted father, the only man who had ever cared anything for him, the person who had taught him what it meant to be a man, who had sacrificed everything for the only things he had loved, would not be found there. Like the others, he gone up in smoke and ash.

The two soldiers were silent as the darkness came on.

Sam turned to Bono. “Things haven’t gone too well, have they?” he asked.

Bono shook his head, discouragement softening his icy-blue eyes. “It ain’t going swimmingly, I suppose.”

“They’ve been saying it for years now. This place is not worth the price we’ve paid.”

Bono thought of Rodriguez and didn’t say anything.

Sam stared at Bono, then turned back to the growing darkness around them. “The air transports are lined up down in Basra. We’ll be out of here tomorrow. Think we’ll ever come back?”

“I don’t know,” Bono said.

Sam thought a long moment. “Would you die for this place?” he asked as the moon started to rise at their backs.

Bono shrugged his shoulders. “For this place or this cause?”

“I don’t know. Take your pick. Our cause. Our mission. The things they tell us to do.”

A light breeze began to move the night air. “All we’re trying to do is help them,” Bono answered from the dark.

Sam kept his eyes on the horizon, staring at the spot where the sun used to be.

“Just trying to help them,” Bono repeated as if he were trying to convince himself.

Sam grunted and asked, “Does that mean yes or no?”

Bono slowly nodded. “Yes, I would die here. I would die for this cause. Good men die here every day. Some Americans. Some Iraqis. All are children of God.”

Sam nodded, his face determined, then turned toward the lieutenant. “I want you to know something, Bono. I tell you now as my friend.

“I would die for this mission. It’s a magnificent cause. My father died for this duty. So have others I have loved. I want to live—you know we all do—but I won’t turn away from this fight. Every generation has its battles, and this is the fight of our time.

“You remember that, Bono.” He touched the lieutenant on the chest. “If you have to, you go and tell them, ‘I did what I had to do.’”

ELEVEN

Royal Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

As the afternoon wore on, the children of the royal family spread across the great lawn and green gardens. A few were standing on the shore, dipping their feet into the man-made lake; a few were chasing the camel riders through the trees. Many of the younger children had gathered near the back wall of the palace where an ice cream fountain oozed ice cream and chocolate and sent it cascading down four tiers of silver plates.

The king’s security agents, large men in black robes and gray turbans, moved through the crowd. They had divided up their assignments, and they moved among the offspring of the princes very quickly, taking up their charges one by one.

The largest of the security men moved toward Prince Saud bin-Alquana, the Foreign Minister’s oldest son. Eighteen and proud, he stood above the other children, watching his younger cousins play. The king’s man moved toward the princeling and touched him on the elbow. “Sayid, I need you to come with me,” he said.

The young prince turned. He was dark, determined, and stout like his father. “Who are you?” he demanded.

The agent nodded, lifting his bearded chin toward the palace. “Your father sent me for you.”

“My father?”

“Sayid.” The agent bowed.

The princeling hesitated. Something didn’t feel right. He didn’t know what it was, but his gut seemed to crunch. “Who are you? Where is my father?”

“Young prince, I am to take you to him.”

The prince wanted to pull back. He wanted to run away. The sudden fear made no sense, but he knew that something was horribly wrong. “What does my father want?” he demanded, trying to force a strong voice.

“I do not ask, my Sayid.” The agent put a little pressure on the young man’s elbow, his grip firm.

The young man didn’t move.

“Come,” the agent said, his voice lower now. “I have my orders. You will come with me.”

Tightening his grip, he pulled the young prince along.

Around him, the king’s other men gathered up the oldest sons of the princes who were meeting in the Great Hall.

TWELVE

The Ab Tayyib (The Good Father), Eighty-Five Miles Southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina

Small for an oceangoing craft, the 1,600-ton cargo ship Ab Tayyib (previously called the Cristi, previously called the Sunna, previously called the Ali Bin, which was what the ship was called when it first raised suspicion as being an al-Qaeda-operated vessel) had been re-flagged and re-registered at least a dozen times in its life, three times in the past month alone. Presently flagged in Cambodia as the Ab Tayyib (a good name and good omen, God willing, the captain thought), the ship was owned by a Greek shipowner, Dimitris Kokkos, and a Pakistani-American, Rifat Muhammed. More or less permanent residents of Croatia, both Kokkos and Muhammed were wanted by the Greek authorities for smuggling, an inconvenience that required several hundred thousand dollars in annual bribes to keep the government at bay.

The Ab Tayyib was black with red striping, freshly painted but rusting underneath the thick paint that had been carelessly slapped on. Barnacled below the waterline and poorly maintained, the Ab Tayyib’s two huge diesel engines kept the dual propellers pounding at the sea, but it was becoming more common to have to shut down one of the engines for maintenance as the ship chugged along. The deck was worn, the grating torn in places, and the cavernous hold smelled of diesel, grease, mold, salt water, and filth. The ship had been at sea for several months now, having stopped in Malaysia before moving on to Cambodia, where it was re-flagged a final time before sailing back to Yemen, through the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal.

Ten weeks after leaving the expanding ports at Jeddah, the ship had traveled the equivalent distance of a trip around the world. It would have been impossible to have tracked it even if it hadn’t been repainted, re-flagged, and renamed.

There was simply no way to know or be suspicious when the ship showed up off the eastern coast of the United States.

Had the Coast Guard had any reason to board the vessel, it would have taken only seconds for the mission of the Ab Tayyib to become painfully obvious. The ballistic missiles and elevator-controlled launcher built into the hold were pretty hard to disguise.

At 4:43 a.m. local time, the improvised communications center inside the rusting Ab Tayyib got the highly encrypted strike instructions. The exact altitudes, flight azimuths, trajectories, and yield settings for the warheads had already been programmed into the flight computers, but still the captain reviewed the final flight instructions very carefully, comparing every line of code against the numbers burned into his memory.

His first officer hovered over him, his hands moving nervously.

“Praise be to Allah,” the ship captain finally said.

The first officer forced a quick smile, though inside he had to hold down a cry of grief.

He didn’t want to die. No man really did. But he would die now, he knew that, and though he had been preparing for this moment since he was a child, the reality of having just a few hours to live still left him cold.

He thought of his wife. He thought of his children. Would they know? Would they remember? Would they honor his death as much he hoped that they would?

The Choun Ohmonee (The Good Mother), Ninety-Three Miles west of San Francisco

The Choun Ohmonee was a smaller ship than the Ab Tayyib, but more seaworthy, faster, and ten years newer. Flagged in North Korea, a society more secretive than any other nation in the world, it hadn’t gone through the painful exercise of re-registering and re-flagging to hide its movements and identity, though it had been renamed as a concession to the Arab masters.

The arming and deployment of the Choun Ohmonee had been a straight-up operation. No subterfuge or deception had been involved; it simply loaded up the missiles at the military port in Cho’ong Jim, then headed east across the open Pacific toward the United States.

Now, sitting off the western coast, it waited for the same message as its sister ship to the east.

THIRTEEN

East Side, Chicago, Illinois

Mary Shaye Dupree held the sleeping girl’s hand while speaking to her softly. She wiped her brow, which was pale and clammy, then pushed aside a stray strand of dark hair as she caressed her cheek. The girl’s face was bony, her lips tight, her thin hair matted to the side on which she slept. Azadeh noted the intravenous line sticking into the child’s left arm and the monitor attached to her middle finger, but she wasn’t certain what they were for.

When the child didn’t wake, Mary leaned across the mattress and kissed her, tucked the soft blanket around her neck, stood, and turned to Azadeh, motioning toward the hall. Closing the bedroom door quietly behind her, she walked with Azadeh into the living room again.

“Her name is Kelly Beth,” Mary said as they sat down. “I adopted her when she was just a toddler, which was some six years ago now.”

“A toddler?” Azadeh wondered.

“I’m sorry—a young child—not a baby, a little older.”

Azadeh nodded, understanding. “She is very sick?”

“Yes. Very sick.” Mary turned her eyes to toward the window. It had started raining and the day had turned gray. “She isn’t going to live, I don’t think. I used to hope. I used to pray. But I don’t think any of it mattered.”

Azadeh studied her hands. “She has a sickness?”

“Cancer. Inoperable bone cancer.”

Cancer. One of the very few English words that Azadeh would have recognized even as a child. It translated to saratân in Farsi. She nodded sadly. It was a dreaded word, a deadly sickness, a sickness that, based on her experience, didn’t offer much hope. When someone got saratân in her small village back in Persia, that person was almost certain to die. No such thing as insurance. No real money to speak of. No good doctors. Those with saratân might die in a short time or a long, they might die in a lot of pain or maybe quickly, but they almost surely wouldn’t live.

“I’m sorry,” she offered quietly.

“We caught it really late,” Mary continued, her voice pained and measured now. “I know that it was my fault. I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. But at the time, I just didn’t understand, I didn’t realize, I had never dealt with anything like this before. She hurt all the time, deep in her legs, and I took her to the doctor, but the people down at the clinic, you know, they’re inexperienced and way overworked. It wasn’t their fault. I think they did the best that they could, but by the time I got a referral down to Cook County Hospital, there wasn’t a lot they could do. They tried a few things, some new things, they experimented with some new drugs and procedures, but like I said, we were—you know—way too late to help her… .” Mary’s voice trailed off.

Azadeh watched a single tear roll down each of her cheeks, which Mary quickly wiped away. It pained Azadeh to see her suffering, and she instinctively wanted to reach out and take her by the hand.

Someone moved down the hallway outside their front door. The rain dribbled against the kitchen window, trickling down from the fifteen stories overhead. The old refrigerator hummed. But other than that it was silent as Mary stared across the empty space. “I love her,” she finished. “I would have done anything for her. I would do anything now. If there was anything I could do… .”

Azadeh reached out and took Mary’s hand, holding it inside her own. “I’m so, so sorry,” she repeated.

Mary coughed, then turned to face her. “The good Lord, He is out there. I have to learn to trust Him. It will all be OK.”

Azadeh nodded back toward the bedroom. “Insha’allah. If it is God’s will.”

Mary nodded. “Insha’allah. God’s will.”

Azadeh was a sensitive girl by nature, and her upbringing had only made her more so. She knew that Mary wanted to talk about her child. “Tell me her name again,” she asked.

“Kelly Beth.”

“Kelly Beth. That is beautiful. If you were to translate my middle name, Ishbel, from Farsi into English it is very close to Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Kelly Beth. Two good names. Very similar.” Azadeh paused a long moment, looking off. “My last name, Pahlavi, goes back many, many generations in Iran. It is royal blood. And my given name, Azadeh, means ‘Freedom is my oath to God.’” She folded her arms, almost defiant, and her eyes flashed. “I have always been very proud of my names,” she said.

Mary smiled and touched her shoulder. “Ishbel is almost the same as Elizabeth?” she asked.

“Yes, very close.”

“That is beautiful.”

Azadeh nodded down the hallway toward the bedroom. “How old is Kelly Beth?”

“Almost ten. She will be ten next month.”

“Then we will celebrate her birthday.”

Mary pressed her lips together. “If she makes it that long.”

“You said that she is—I do not remember the word—she is not your own… flesh? Your own child?”

Mary stood and walked into the kitchen. There was a small coffeemaker beside the sink, and she poured herself a cup. “Would you like some?” she asked Azadeh as she lifted the half-empty pot.

“No, thank you.”

“You do not like coffee?”

“Not American coffee. It is too weak. Like water. We have a much stronger drink. I miss it. It is good. But,” she laughed a little, “very bad for you, I think. It stains our teeth and makes us, ah, quick to temper. I am glad to be away from it, I think.”

Mary brought her cup back and sat on the couch, folding her legs underneath her to keep her feet warm. “I adopted Kelly Beth when she was just a child. Her father had abandoned her before she was even born. Her parents never married. Her mother was strung out. Do you know what that means, Azadeh?”

Azadeh shook her head.

“Oh, that is so beautiful,” Mary laughed with delight. “You don’t know what strung out even means. You’ve never had to fight it. You’ve never had to watch what it can do to those around you. That is very good, Azadeh.” She reached toward the young woman and patted her knee. “We want to keep it that way, girl. We’re going to keep it that way.”

Mary leaned back against the couch and sipped the warm coffee. “Strung out is when you have ruined your life on hard drugs. Heroin. Cocaine. You know about them?”

Azadeh squinted as she thought. “No,” she finally said.

“That’s all right, baby, we can talk about that later. Let’s just say that Kelly Beth’s mother wasn’t able to take care of her anymore. She didn’t want her baby, at least not sufficient to keep herself healthy enough to care for her. I had a chance to take Kelly Beth and help her. It was supposed to be only for a couple of weeks, a couple of months at the longest, but it went on and on, and it ended up that I was able to adopt her, you know, make her my child.”

Azadeh nodded.

“Her mother is dead now,” Mary concluded. “No one knows about her father. No one even knows who he is.”

“I understand,” Azadeh answered. But the truth was she didn’t. It was all so strange. So different. There was much to learn in this new country, and she felt lost and insecure.

For a moment she almost wished she were back in Khorramshahr. It had been hard there, but she had understood it, unlike so much of this new home.

FOURTEEN

Royal Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

King Al-Rahman walked into the Great Hall. The thirty-foot ceiling towered over his head and the room was dark, illuminated mostly by a row of dim lights along the ancient walls. Four huge, wrought-iron chandeliers hung from enormous beams that crossed the ceiling, but the room was built deep inside the palace, and there were no outside windows or natural light. The thick walls, heavy brick and ancient mud, stifled every sound from outside. Four overstuffed leather couches were arranged around a circular depression in the floor, part of an old fire pit. A low oak table trimmed with gold sat where the fireplace used to be.

Al-Rahman moved to the center of the room. His eight brothers fell silent and the room seemed to suck them up, making them feel even smaller than they were. Al-Rahman raised his hand, indicating for the ministers to sit down, which they did, dividing themselves up among the four couches.

Al-Rahman studied them without saying anything, assessing the mood in the room. Yes, they were some of the most powerful men in the world, but each of them stared up at him with dark, submissive eyes.

The king knew that some of his brothers were furious at his sudden rise to power. Some resented the death of their father and their oldest brother, the crown prince. Most suspected that Al-Rahman had killed them, but they couldn’t prove it, even if they had wanted to. None of them did—far better to leave that filthy stone unturned—but they resented the fact all the same.

They also realized that Al-Rahman had turned the kingdom away from their father’s path toward democracy. None of them were disappointed by that, though some might have wished it hadn’t been so bloody. And though they were grateful the king had secured their royal power, they were also furious about the nuclear attacks in Gaza and Washington, D.C. The entire world had been thrown into utter chaos. Things were so messy now, so much more difficult to control.

As the eight ministers took their seats, Al-Rahman almost smirked. If they had any idea… any idea what he planned to do.

“Brothers,” he started slowly, “let me get right to the point.”

The princes watched him carefully. They hardly seemed to move as a heavy air settled over the room.

Al-Rahman paced, his eyes cold and sullen, his skin tight, the hollows of his cheeks deep and dark. He seemed to cast a spell upon them as he moved, drawing them in to his world. “Some of you are wondering,” he started, “so I will tell you. Yes, I killed our father. Yes, I killed Crown Prince Saud. I killed his wife, Princess Tala. I killed their children. I killed them all.”

The men sat in stunned and open-mouthed silence. Not a sound penetrated the ancient walls. Only their breathing and a few croaking swallows could be heard in the enormous room.

“I killed them,” Al-Rahman went on, “but that is not everything you need to know. I also arranged for the nuclear attack in Gaza. I arranged for the attack on D.C. as well. And we are just beginning.” The king glanced down at his watch. “The most deadly attacks will take place a little less than three hours from now.”

The senior prince bowed his head. Al-Rahman watched him carefully, then went on. “Believe me, dear brothers, I have just started my work. I killed our father. I killed our brother. Now I will kill you as well. You are either with me or against me. There is no middle ground. You either join me or I kill you. It is as simple as that.

“What’s it going to be? You have two minutes to decide.”

The senior prince stood up, his face contorted with rage. “Join you?! You’re a madman! You killed my father. You killed my brother. I will never—”

Al-Rahman reached under his robe, took out a Colt .45 from a shoulder holster, and shot his younger brother in the head. By the time he hit the ground, the senior prince was already dead. The sound of the gunfire echoed through the enormous chamber and then was swallowed up again. The air filled with the acidic tartness of burnt gunpowder, and blood began to seep from under the dead prince’s head.

King Al-Rahman took a step back, eyeing the other princes in the room. They stared at him aghast, too shocked to speak or move. “Don’t underestimate me,” he told them as he fingered the warm barrel of his pistol. “I am totally committed to my course. This isn’t something I dreamed up in the past week or so. This goes back much further. I have been planning this for years.”

Standing before his brothers, the king thought back to his first meeting with the old man, so many years before. He thought of their introduction on the beach, the airplane trip to the city, sitting in the Mercedes outside the United States Embassy in Paris, learning he had to kill the people inside the embassy before he could take the next step.

He could hear the old man’s voice as it hissed in his ears. “Commit now to join us! Tell me to kill your countrymen. Prove to me we can trust you. Now what are you going to do?”

It was a good test. Al-Rahman knew that now. Catch them off guard. Make them decide! Who were they? What were they? What was really in their hearts? Would they kill or would they hesitate? Would they wash their hands in blood?

The results of the test were immediate and nearly flawless. There was no cheating, no second-guessing, no faking the results. They were either with him or against him. And they had to kill to join his cause.

And not just any blood was going to satisfy him. The king was more demanding than that now. It would take more than a simple murder after all that he had learned.

Al-Rahman turned to his brothers and took a step toward them. “Are you with me? Then you must do this! I want to know what’s in your heart. Will you bloody your hands to join me? Or will you choose to die right now?”

“Join you?” one of his younger brothers muttered, his eyes gaping wide in rage and fright. “Join you, King Abdullah? What are you talking about?”

“Join me as I bring the Great Satan to its knees. And if you think that I’ve already done that, let me assure you, you are wrong. There will be another attack before the day ends, an attack that will destroy them as a nation, send them back two hundred years. Tens of millions are going to die. And then we will rise up with our brothers as the most powerful people on the earth.” Al-Rahman stopped and caught a breath. His face was drawn now, his eyes blazing, his lips pulled tight. He looked almost like an animal: bared teeth and glowing eyes, his heartbeat racing through the pulsing vein against his neck.

“Christianity! Freedom! Human rights!” He spit the words. “These are foul and loathsome things. The spirit of their God is found in freedom. But with one attack, we kill them both!”

“Tell me, my younger brothers, and I want you to tell me now! I will need your help to establish the world order after the U.S. has been destroyed. There is too much work, too much responsibility to be carried by just one man. I need your allegiance. But I need to know right now. Will you join me? Will you help me destroy the Great Satan? Are you willing to help me kill a hundred million of our enemies, to completely bring them down? Or do you seek a weaker peace, a weakened nation, a weakened order, a weakened state?”

The king took another breath. The muscles in his face relaxed and he lowered his eyes. He paced back and forth once again, then glanced down at his watch. “Twenty seconds and counting. What is it going to be?”

The seven men sat in stunned silence. Their mouths gaped open as they stared with dry and unblinking eyes. It had been less than three minutes since the king had walked into the room. Three minutes to learn that he had killed their father, the crown prince, a hundred thousand Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, all the people in Washington, D.C. Three minutes to watch him shoot their older brother!

One of them looked down at the dead prince, who lay atop a spreading pool of dark blood.

It had to be a joke. It could not be real!

“King Abdullah,” he started, lifting his eyes to the king, “what are you saying?” His voice was high and rasping, panic rising with the wad of spit in his throat.

“Are you with me?” Al-Rahman demanded, his eyes blazing again. “Are you willing to work with me as we reorder the world?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t even know what you are talking about!”

Al-Rahman lifted the Colt and shot him.

The prince fell over dead.

FIFTEEN

East Side, Chicago, Illinois

The first night that Azadeh was in her home, Mary lay in her bed without moving, listening to the dark. She could hear Kelly Beth’s deep breathing just beside her and she suddenly panicked as she counted every breath.

How many precious breaths did her child have left?

She lay there in near terror for an hour, but no matter how she tried she couldn’t help but count the breaths. Finally, in dark frustration, she pushed herself out of bed. Moving down the hall, she quietly opened the door to Azadeh’s bedroom and looked in on her. She could see only the girl’s outline in the dark, but it appeared she was asleep. Mary closed the door and walked quietly into the kitchen, moved to the window, and looked out on the night.

Just in front of her was another brick wall, another tenement building, dirty and blackened from a generation of soot. Five floors below her, a homeless man slept on the grate. Steam rose around him, but still he shivered from cold. Mary watched him, then turned her gaze to the only patch of night sky she could see from her valley of mortar and stone; there were no stars in East Chicago and she could not see the moon.

She reached out to open her dirty kitchen window, pushing up against three or four coats of white paint, but the window held tight. How long had it been since she had opened it up? She pressed upward again and the thin pane finally moved a few inches, allowing the cold air to blow inside.

She stood by the sink, letting the air chill her bare arms, and took a deep breath to savor the smell. The air came up from the park and carried a faint scent of trees and wet brush. It was quiet outside, at least as quiet as Chicago could be. With the taxis and Martin Luther King Highway, the elevated train on its track, music from the bars, and the thugs on the streets, she never heard actual silence, just a softer roar. She glanced down at the drug dealers on the street corner. They were there every night, come heat, snow, rain, or shine, a permanent part of the sidewalk, like the cracks in the cement. The coming storm meant absolutely nothing to them. Nuclear war in the Middle East, even nuclear war in their own country, none of that mattered to these men on the streets or the addicts who lined up to get another hit.

At forty-three, the black woman was petite, with a thin face and small nose. Mary Shaye Dupree was an old southern name that went back three hundred years, back to the mistress of an old French plantation owner on the outskirts of New Orleans. But that was a long time ago, and Mary Shaye had no sense of her southern roots. Four generations before, her kin had migrated north, looking for jobs and freedom from the cotton fields, but she hardly knew about them or appreciated what they did.

Mary was a strong and good-looking woman, but her strength was fading fast, for the world and its burdens were bringing defeat. Wrapping her arms around her shoulders, she shivered from the night air. She studied her reflection in the window, staring into her own eyes. Seeing the defeat, she turned quickly away.

Walking down the narrow hallway, Mary made her way back to her bedroom and stared at her daughter’s gaunt face in the dim light. The child was beautiful still, though her hair had grown thin and her lips had drawn tight. She was sleeping in pain; that was clear from her groans. As Mary studied her, she felt the helpless pangs of despair. She was no longer angry—she only felt empty now.

The best thing she had ever done in her life was to take this little girl and bring her into her home. Some of her happiest moments had been when she held this child in her arms. For almost six years she had loved her as if she were her own—maybe more, she didn’t know—all she knew was that she loved her until she couldn’t love any more.

And now her little girl was being taken, piece by piece, day by day. The vibrant laugh, the soft hugs, the wonderful smile—all of it fading, all of it dying away.

Kelly Beth opened her eyes and looked up at her mom.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Mary said quietly.

“I had a weird dream,” Kelly Beth answered, her voice dragging out from fatigue.

“Tell me about it.” Mary sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t know, Mom. It was so real. So clear. But I don’t get it.”

“That’s the way of dreams,” her mother answered softly.

Kelly Beth waited, catching her breath. “I was watching a funeral,” she began. “There was a horse and a wagon, and lots of military guys around, and this beautiful little girl, the funeral must have been for her dad. And when it was over, she looked up to the sky like she was talking to God.”

Her mother listened, then nodded. “Is that all?” she asked.

“No, Mom, and this is the part that I don’t get. While I was watching this funeral, it felt like it was for someone I knew, someone almost like a brother, I think.”

Her mother smiled, then pulled her close. “But you don’t have a brother, Kelly.”

The girl relaxed against her pillow. “But the feeling was so clear.”

Her mother patted her hand, then kissed her cheek. “Think about it,” she said, “and maybe you’ll figure it out.”

The little girl closed her eyes, exhaustion overcoming her again. Seconds later, she was asleep.

*******

Mary watched her daughter for a long time, then wiped her eyes, stepped across the mattress, and lay down on her bed. Resting on her pillow, she stared up at the dark.

She was relieved and happy to have Azadeh here, but Kelly was fading quickly now, and Mary felt like it wasn’t fair to bring Azadeh into this situation after all that she had been through. But it was what it was, and there was nothing she could do.

Rolling over, she thought of the young men she had seen on the street. The two young preachers looked ridiculously out of place, like baby-faced monks in their white shirts and ties. “Go back to Utah!” one of the tenement neighbors had mocked them as they had walked down the street. The boys had smiled and waved to her, then continued on their way. That was two weeks before, and she had not seen them since.

The worried mother thought about them, then rolled across the mattress once again.

The night passed in silence, but sleep didn’t come, for the faces of the strangers seemed to haunt her somehow. Why couldn’t she forget them? It made no sense at all! Who were they, these preachers? And why did she burn inside?

“Find them!” a quiet voice seemed to cry in her soul. “I have a great work for your children. Go out and find them so they can save Kelly’s life!”

SIXTEEN

East Side, Chicago, Illinois

Mary got out of bed long before anyone else was awake. The sun was barely up and the city was still coated in dark hues. She checked Kelly Beth’s drip line, felt her face, then pulled on a T-shirt, sweatpants, and some old leather shoes. She wrote Azadeh a quick note, then let herself out of the apartment and headed for the stairs—easier and faster to walk five floors down than to wait for the elevator.

Crossing the noisy, six-lane street that ran in front of the housing complex, she dodged a dozen yellow cabs and police cars. The riots had subsided, but the tension was still as thick as the smell of exhaust in the air and it seemed the police were everywhere. Walking through the screen door at the old corner market, she headed immediately to the cooler, looking for some milk and eggs. The cooler was almost completely empty: A few sodas and some hot dogs were all it contained. She walked back to the counter and in her most commanding voice said, “Marlo, you swore to me that you’d have some dairy products by this morning.”

The large black man looked at her regretfully. “I’m sorry, Mary, I really am. They promised they’d send us a truck yesterday, but you know the gig, we’re the last ones in line. You think they’re going to bust their butts to get some stuff down here to East Side? I don’t think so, dear. We’ll get it when the white folks in midtown and Naperville are stocked up and fat.”

Mary leaned into the counter. “Marlo, you got to help me. You know what I’m going through with Kelly Beth. She has to have some milk with her morning medicine or she gets sick to her stomach. I’m not exaggerating, Marlo, she gets sick and throws up. You can’t do that to her. Please, isn’t there something you could do?”

The store owner shook his head. “I can’t turn water into milk. I can’t just make it appear. I’m not hiding anything in the back cooler. I just don’t have anything right now.”

Mary clenched her jaw in sadness and frustration. “So a bomb goes off in D.C. and the entire world falls apart. A bomb goes off in D.C. and all the milk and dairy products in Chicago disappear. It isn’t right, Marlo, I’m telling you it isn’t right.”

“Tell me about it, Mary. I haven’t slept in five days. Four nights in a row, I’ve had to stand guard by my front door. Do you know how many thugs I’ve had to scare away from my place?” He reached beneath the counter and stroked the shotgun he had hidden there. “I’m the only joint on the block that hasn’t been completely looted.”

Mary glanced behind her at the nearly bare shelves. “I don’t know, Marlo, it looks pretty well looted to me.”

The man only huffed. “The cops don’t care about any of us black store owners. The Koreans and Pakistanis up in Gary, they get taken care of, but us folks down here in the projects, we got to fend for ourselves.”

Mary shrugged and looked around. “Any bread?” she said.

Marlo seemed to stop and think before reaching down below the counter. Feeling beside the shotgun, he pulled out two loaves. “My last two,” he said, then nodded to the back door. “There are a couple dozen eggs in the back room. You better get them, too.”

Mary squinted. “Thank you, Marlo. I mean that. Thanks.”

She started walking toward the backroom cooler and Marlo called out to her. “You could take some of those eggs and mix them with warm coffee. Give that to Kelly with her medicine. That’ll help keep it down.”

Mary went into the back room, then returned to the counter with the cartons. “Hey, Marlo,” she said as he rang up her small sack of groceries. “There are a couple guys around here. I haven’t seen them in a while. Young guys. You know them?”

The store owner shook his head. “I don’t know. You talking cops?”

“No, no, no. Preachers. Or preacher types.”

“Jehovah Witnesses. I thought they abandoned this miserable place.”

Mary hesitated. “I don’t think that’s them,” she said.

Marlo shuffled his feet. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “God and his preachers have abandoned this place. Nothing here but misery. That’s what’s left in this place.”

Mary thought in silence. “I was hoping,” she started before Marlo cut her off.

“Don’t go hoping, Mary. That’s a foolish thing to do. There isn’t no more hope here, Mary. You can’t find no hope at all.”

Mary nodded sadly, bitter disappointment seeping deep into her soul. You told me to find them! she thought sullenly. Someone who could help me. But how can I find them if they’re not here anymore!

*******

Mary waited in the lobby for the elevator, grocery sack in hand. Minutes passed. The elevator never descended—apparently it was broken again—so she headed up the stairs, grateful she lived only five flights up.

Letting herself into her apartment, she kicked off her leather shoes behind the door and headed for the kitchen. Azadeh was sitting at the small table, the newspaper spread out, reading the front page. A large picture of blackened Washington, D.C., took up most of the space above the fold. Mary glanced at it. “Anything new?” she asked.

“I don’t understand most of it,” Azadeh answered. “I read to help me with my English.”

“That’s good,” Mary said as she placed the small sack of groceries on the narrow counter next to the refrigerator. Glancing over her shoulder, she asked, “Have you looked in on Kelly?”

“She is asleep,” Azadeh answered. She hesitated, then added, “She seemed cold. I put another blanket on her and sat with her for a time. I did not try to wake her, but I just wanted, you know, I just thought she might like someone there, even if she was asleep. I hope that was OK. I sat by her on the mattress and sang a little song.”

Mary turned to face her. “That’s sweet, baby. You are kind. And you’re right, I sometimes think she’s asleep but then I’m surprised to find out that she was awake and hearing everything that I said.”

Azadeh pressed her lips together, thinking of Miss Pari. “My father used to sing me a song when I was young,” she said. “It is a beautiful song, a little sad, but in a nice sort of way.” She started singing in Farsi, the words gentle and slow.

Mary closed her eyes as she listened. “That is beautiful,” she said when Azadeh was finished.

Azadeh looked away, embarrassed.

“Will you teach me the words? Will you translate them into English?”

“I will try,” Azadeh answered. “But they don’t translate exactly.”

“Try. Please. Do the best that you can.”

Azadeh thought a long moment, then started singing.

The world that I give you

Is not always sunny and bright.

But knowing I love you

Will help make it right.

So when the dark settles,

And the storms fill the night,

Remember I’ll be waiting

When it comes,

Morning Light.

Mary smiled. “So beautiful. I love that!”

Azadeh let her eyes fall to the floor. Mary watched her closely. The young woman was dressed in a black skirt that rested on her knees and a red blouse with a matching sash around her waist. Her thick black hair fell past her shoulders and was tied with a ribbon at the back. Her skin was a perfect bronze, her eyes large and bright. She didn’t have on any makeup, but she didn’t need any and never would. Staring at her, Mary realized she was as naturally beautiful as anyone she had ever seen before.

“Gosh, it’s so good to have you here!” she exclaimed.

Azadeh smiled shyly.

Mary stared at her a moment longer. “You don’t have any idea how beautiful you are, do you, Azadeh?” She sat down at the small kitchen table as she spoke.

Azadeh lowered her eyes but didn’t answer.

Mary leaned toward her. “You really don’t understand, do you?”

The look on Azadeh’s face assured Mary that she didn’t. Mary thought for a long moment. It was going to be hard. And it almost seemed wrong. But she had to tell her. She had to warn her. She had to strip away some of her innocence if she was going to survive in this place. She had to lay it out to prepare her to live in this new world. It was a wonder, an absolute modern-day miracle, that someone as old as Azadeh could be so innocent. It was—she didn’t know how to describe it—renewing and beautiful. Many of the children around her had little babies of their own, yet Azadeh seemed to be completely innocent of such things. “Azadeh,” she started, “you are a beautiful young lady. I know that all this is new, but you’re going to have to be careful.”

Azadeh looked at her. “Careful,” she echoed.

“Careful, baby. There are people around here, people in this city, in this neighborhood, in this building even, who will hurt you or take advantage of you in very bad ways. Some of them will try to fool you. They’ll pretend to be your friend. They’ll act one way one day, then turn on you, baby. Do you understand anything I’m saying?”

Azadeh met Mary’s eyes. She remembered the Iraqi who had come to fetch her from the camp, the man who claimed to be an agent for the uncle she didn’t have. She remembered the way he had looked at her, the way he had summed her up with his eyes. She remembered other men, some old, some young, who looked at her the same way. So yes, she understood. She understood much more than Mary thought.

Mary waited, intertwining her fingers nervously. “We’ll talk more a little later,” she finally said. “Now, did you get some breakfast?”

Azadeh’s forehead furrowed.

“Breakfast. You know, did you get something to eat?”

“No, not yet, but I made myself some tea if that’s all right.”

“Sure. Anything. This is your home; you can have anything you like.” Mary stood up, went to the counter, and started putting the little bit of groceries away. “Azadeh, I have to go down to Columbus tomorrow,” she said as she worked. “Kelly has an appointment with a doctor at a special clinic down there. It’s been scheduled for months. She has seen him a couple of times, but this will probably be her last visit. I really hate to leave you, but it’s a long drive, about four hours each way, so I’m going to leave tonight.”

“I will be fine,” Azadeh answered. “You do not have to worry about me.”

“Really? You’ll be OK?”

“Of course, Mary.”

Azadeh heard a child’s voice calling from down the hall. Mary heard it too. Both of them stood and walked toward the bedroom.

*******

Mary went in first while Azadeh stood near the doorway, unsure of whether she should go in or stay out. Mary knelt on the mattress, lifting Kelly’s hand. “How you doing, baby doll?” she asked.

Azadeh noted Mary’s cheerful voice. She knew the woman was forcing herself to be so positive, and she admired her ability.

“Good morning, Mom,” Kelly answered.

“You slept in this morning.”

“I was tired, I guess.” Kelly didn’t notice the stranger standing at the door. Mary leaned over and kissed her forehead, then stood and pulled up the heavy Venetian blinds. The sky was clear, and sunlight flooded into the crowded room. “Kelly, remember we talked about the young lady who was going to come and stay with us.”

The child’s eyes immediately brightened. She slowly turned her head and looked toward the door. “She’s here! You’re here!” She reached for Azadeh’s hand. “Azadeh. You’re here! My mom and I have been waiting! My name is Kelly Beth.” The little girl struggled to sit up.

Azadeh moved toward her and dropped to the floor. She took the girl’s hand and held it. “Hi, Kelly Beth,” she said.

The two young women appraised each other. “Oh my gosh, you’re so beautiful,” Kelly said. “Even more beautiful than your picture. Isn’t she beautiful, Mom?”

Mary had to laugh. “Funny you should mention that,” she said.

Azadeh held her hand more tightly. “Miss Kelly, you are the beautiful one.”

The little girl shook her head and smiled. “No, Azadeh. Not since—” she shot a quick look toward Mary. “You have told her, Mom?”

Mary moved back toward the floor mattress and sat down beside Azadeh. “Yeah, baby. She knows.”

Kelly turned back to Azadeh. “I used to be beautiful like you. Well, maybe not so beautiful, but I was pretty. But not now. Not anymore.”

Azadeh shook her head. “No, Miss Kelly, I can see it. I can see through the sickness. You are still beautiful.”

The younger girl looked uncomfortable. “I hate for people to see me anymore. It’s embarrassing.”

Azadeh whispered something to her in Farsi.

“What was that?” Kelly asked.

Azadeh repeated the phrase, this time in English: “Beautiful is the soul that looks out from my eyes.”

Kelly listened and thought a moment. “I like that,” she said. She looked away, her forehead furrowed, then slowly turned to Mary. “Mom, last night I woke up. I told you about my dream? That’s true, right?”

“Yes,” Mary answered.

Kelly turned back to Azadeh. “She was in my dream,” she said, pointing, her voice animated now. “I remember it all perfectly now. There was a funeral. A little girl. Lots of soldiers. But Azadeh was there too. She was standing in the back. And she was, she was crying.”

Kelly looked into Azadeh’s eyes. “Why were you crying, Azadeh?” she asked. “Why were you in my dream?”

SEVENTEEN

Royal Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

It took less than five minutes for King Al Rahman to know which of his brothers were going to join him.

Soon after he had shot the first two men, the remaining six began to see the light. Later, when two more faltered upon understanding what he intended to do, they were quickly taken care of. The four remaining princes had agreed to join him, swearing allegiance to his cause.

King Al Rahman had known that two of the four would join him. The third one, he had been uncertain about. And the fourth prince who had chosen to support him had come as a complete surprise, proving once again how difficult it was to truly judge a man’s heart.

After getting their agreement, the king had given the four conspirators two hours to ponder, sending them to their rooms under guard. Once the sun had set and left the desert to swallow up the yellow light from the moon, once the hot wind had quit blowing from the dry lands to the south, the four princes had come together in the Great Hall and waited on their king again.

*******

Al Rahman looked at them through a gap in the bricks where the mortar had cracked away. The old man stood beside him, his hot breath in Al Rahman’s ear as they watched the four men mill together, their faces drawn and tight.

“Do you see them?” the old man whispered.

Al Rahman shook his head.

“They are there,” the old man assured him. “Believe me, they are there. Now that the sun has set, they are more free to move about. They hate the light, any light: the light of the sun, the light of freedom, the light of the truth. As it is they love the darkness, but there is plenty of darkness now.”

Al Rahman stared, shaking his head. If they were there, he couldn’t see them, but he believed the old man.

The old man pulled away and folded his arms defiantly. “You know that what you are about to do is not original,” he said.

King Al Rahman continued to look through the gap, not saying anything until the old man placed his cold hand upon his shoulder and turned him around. “This thing that you are asking has been done a thousand times before. The Great Enemy, in His hypocrisy, asked it of His own prophet. The ancient Jews, in their apostasy, required it of their own. There have been altars built for this purpose on every continent in the world. It has been a sign and device of Master Mahan since the first blood was spilt upon this world.”

Al Rahman looked at his own hands, remembering the evil things he had done. “I understand,” he offered simply.

The old man waited, then pushed against his shoulder, edging him toward the hidden door. “Go then. I will be watching. You will not let me down.”

*******

King Al Rahman entered the Great Hall and stood before his brothers, reading the looks on their faces and the darkness of their eyes.

“Brothers, we are almost finished,” he said. “Our greatest enemy, the Great Satan, is within a few minutes of being brought to its knees. Once it stumbles it will die, suffering a long and violent death, ripped to pieces from the inside as it seeks to right itself. We will propel the Great Satan to that moment, let there be no doubt in your minds, but we will only push it. It will finish the job itself.

“When it is dead, you and I will be the most powerful men on earth. Then we will turn toward the Little Satan. It will not last a week. The entire world hates the Zionists and will gladly see them destroyed. Then we rise again, the chosen people, and lead our Arab brothers into a Pan-Arab world.”

The four princes were silent. Deep in their hearts, they believed every word that he was saying, for they could hear the dark spirits around them whisper the same lies into their minds.

Al Rahman watched them, satisfied. One more step and he would have them. One more oath and they were his.

Anything they could conceive of, it would be given to these men.

But the power and the glory that he offered was far too great to merely give away. There was a price to pay.

Of course they would agree to join him when a gun was pointed at their heads. That had been a simple exercise to weed out the weakest of the men.

And they might agree to join him for the promised wealth and power.

But it was time now to find out what was really in their hearts. It was time to find out if they were driven by simple brainless lust or greed, or if they could be driven by something else. Something even more powerful. More eternal. More compelling and wonderful.

They had sworn a sacred oath to him, but was their loyalty real? Would they pay the price to join him, or would they cut and run? Would they do what he had done? Would they spill the blood of their family? The blood of their own kin?

He didn’t know.

But he was about to find out.

He clapped his hands, and a hidden door opened at the back of the room. Two of his agents came out holding the oldest son of the minister of defense between them. The boy was bound, his hands tied behind his back. And though his eyes were wide in terror, he didn’t struggle against his bonds.

Al Rahman walked to a couch, reached under the cushion, and pulled out a ten-inch, serrated knife. He turned toward his brother and placed the long knife in his hand. “Brothers,” he said, his voice low and raspy, “it is time to prove your oath.”

EIGHTEEN

East Side, Chicago, Illinois

Mary carefully helped Kelly into a chrome wheelchair and pushed her to the elevator in the middle of the hall. Azadeh followed her out of the apartment. “Remember, Azadeh,” Mary said for at least the third time, “you have my cell phone number right there.”

“Yes,” Azadeh replied.

“You remember how to call me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“The clinic is in downtown Columbus. Northridge Children’s Cancer Center. It is well-known. If you have any questions, you can ask almost anyone.”

Azadeh nodded, smiling as she hovered under Mary’s protective worries.

Mary stood and thought, going through a checklist in her mind. “I’ve got the keys, the map and address—” she glanced at Azadeh. “Can you drive?”

Azadeh shook her head, amazed at the thought. Teenage girls didn’t drive in Iran. Neither did their mothers—at least, few of them did. “No, Mary,” she answered, almost laughing. “No, I do not drive.”

“OK, OK. I was going to tell you that I’ve borrowed a car from Yevonie, she’s a good friend of mine. I don’t think my old beater would have made it, but hers is pretty good. Anyway, I was going to tell you that you could take my car if you needed anything or had to get somewhere, but I don’t suppose that’s going to happen.”

Azadeh laughed again. “No, ma’am, I do not believe I will be driving around Chicago.”

Mary smiled. “Of course not. But someday. Someday soon we’ll help you get your license.”

It was a terrifying thought to Azadeh. Still, she smiled and muttered, “Yes, ma’am” in reply.

Mary had given up on the “ma’am” thing and didn’t correct her. “OK, I think I’ve got everything,” she said, closing her purse. “Remember, we’ll be back tomorrow night. It might be late. I don’t want you to worry, OK? If anything comes up, I’ll call you.”

“I will be fine,” Azadeh said.

Mary reached for the elevator button, then pulled her hand back. “I wish you could come with me,” she said again, “but there’s no place for you to stay. They won’t let you sleep at the clinic. I’m really sorry.”

“It is all right. It really is.”

“I just hate to leave you alone on only the second night you are here. But it won’t always be like this. This is the last time we have to go clear down to Columbus.”

Azadeh lifted a hand to cut Mary off, then walked toward Kelly, who was waiting in her wheelchair. Azadeh knelt down beside her. “You will be OK?” she asked.

“Sure,” Kelly answered. “I like Doctor Ryan. He always has,” she stopped and turned her head to swallow, “a treat for me.” Her voice was weak from talking to Azadeh for so long that morning.

Kelly looked up with her dark eyes and Azadeh felt her heart melt. There was so much about this little girl that was so easy to love.

Azadeh smiled at her, but inside she seemed to panic. Kelly looked so weak, so drawn out, as if at the end of a battle that had gone on too long. “Have a good trip,” she added quickly to push the thought away. “When you get back, I will teach you how to speak more Farsi. You never know, it might come in handy sometime.”

Kelly smiled. “See you tomorrow night.”

Mary and Kelly stepped into the elevator, leaving Azadeh alone in the hallway. As she watched the elevator doors close, a thought leapt into Azadeh’s mind.

“Smile at her, Azadeh. You may never see her again.”

She raised her hand and smiled quickly. “Good-bye, Kelly. I’ll see—”

The metal doors rolled shut.

Mary and Kelly were gone.

Azadeh stood sadly for a moment in the hallway, then turned to the open apartment door.

She cleaned and straightened, took a bath, unpacked her clothes, hanging them in the closet (everything she owned hardly filled one half of one side), then stood alone in the middle of the bedroom, unsure of what to do next.

NINETEEN

The Ab Tayyib (The Good Father), Eighty-Seven Miles East-Southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina

Starting as early as 2005, the Iranians had paved the way for the EMP attack upon the United States when, early in the spring, they completed a series of missile tests over the Caspian Sea. Firing from a freighter very similar in size and weight to the Ab Tayyib, they sent their Shehab-3 missiles climbing upward on steep trajectories, exploding them one hundred fifty miles to one hundred eighty miles above the water.

After monitoring the missile tests, the United States had concluded that they were an utter failure. “Missile Tests Fall Short of Expectations,” the classified reports had read.

But the missile tests hadn’t been a failure. In fact, they had been a rousing success.

Further testing in 2006 revealed that the high-altitude nuclear warheads might be better launched using the more powerful and updated Scud missiles. Because of this, King Abdullah had made the decision to replace the Iranian Shehab missiles inside the hull of the Ab Tayyib with the more capable and powerful Scuds.

Developed by the Soviets in the mid-1960s, the Scud missiles were the grandchildren of the German V-2s that haunted England at the end of the Second World War. Originally designed to carry a one hundred-kiloton nuclear warhead, the updated missiles had been sold and shipped to dozens of nations throughout the world. Modified from its original nuclear role, the Scud was capable of carrying a two thousand-pound conventional warhead up to one hundred eighty miles. Later, Pakistani and Iranian scientists had taken the Iraqi Scuds and improved them to provide even greater range. The warhead and fuselage weight had been reduced, the fuel tanks expanded, and the engines modified in order to burn most of the fuel during the launch phase of flight, a technique that developed a far greater launch velocity, pushing the missile even higher into the upper atmosphere.

Known as Al Abbas, the newest Scuds had a range of eight hundred kilometers, a long way to go, especially when flying almost straight up.

But the Scuds did have one problem. Because their warheads were permanently attached to the missile bodies, they were notoriously inaccurate—acceptable when tossing a nuclear weapon, but completely unacceptable in conventional war.

Still, the military officers on board the Ab Tayyib weren’t concerned about the Al Abbas missiles’ weakness. Tonight they needed altitude, not accuracy, and the Scuds were very good for that.

*******

The final launch orders had been received and confirmed. Preparations complete, the captain of the Ab Tayyib turned to his first officer, who stared back with dark, empty eyes. “Are you ready, my friend?” he asked.

The officer nodded slowly but didn’t say anything.

The captain took a deep breath. He had enough Valium and opium in his bloodstream to keep his emotions in check. “Launch the missiles,” he ordered, his voice tight and dry.

The officer stared at him a long moment, then turned and walked away.

*******

Darkness had just settled over the rolling ocean. The skies were almost clear, with scattered layers of thin cirrus at twenty-one thousand feet and twenty-six thousand feet. Operating in the starlight, their navigation lights turned to dim, the weapons crew set to work. The ship was turned to put its stern into the wind and set at twelve knots to match the south wind, minimizing any airflow over the deck. The hold was opened, the dual-plate doors folding back on huge, hydraulic rods, and the elevators rose, lifting the two side-by-side missiles and their launch rails into the dark night.

Eleven minutes after the captain’s order, the launch deck was ready and clear, the final navigation updates input into the missile launch computer, the ship stabilizers below the waterline extended to their maximum length.

The captain gave a final word. Standing at the weapons control panel, the first officer turned his key and stepped back. The captain moved toward the panel, inserted his own key, and punched in a final code.

The gelled fuel moved through the high-pressure lines inside the Scud missile engines, the fuel flow tripling every half-second. Then the deck lit up with white light, turning the darkness into day. Ignition. Smoke. Furious noise and vibration.

The first missile lifted into the air. It hung there half a second, the nose cone moving in the breeze, then thrust skyward into the dark night, the enormous exhaust nozzle blazing white-hot flame. Ten seconds later, the second missile also fired.

The missiles flew in trail, the second missile mimicking the flight path of the first until passing through fifty-five thousand feet. There the second missile turned slightly south, heading for the southern states. The first missile continued northward and climbed, both of them reaching for two hundred eighty-five miles above the earth.

Two hundred eighty-five miles. One million five hundred four thousand eight hundred feet. The perfect altitude.

Any higher and the electromagnetic pulse would be weakened by the distance to the ground. Any lower and the electromagnetic pulse would not been maximized.

Three fishing vessels were within ten miles of the freighter when the missiles fired into the night sky. Two dozen eyes watched as the missiles climbed upward, the white fire illuminating the smoky trail that followed. But no one knew what it was, and no one knew what to do.

As the missiles climbed, they also became visible along the east coast, their smoky contrails and burning engines illuminating the night.

Higher. Higher. Almost straight up they flew. Crossing the shoreline, they followed their intended flight path to the east.

Seventy thousand feet below the first missile, a ten-year-old boy stood on the beach. To his right, the ocean lapped, the whitecaps illuminated by the low moon and stars. Above him, he watched the tiny trail of moving flame.

“What is that?” he asked his brother.

“I don’t know,” his brother said.

It was eleven minutes, nineteen seconds from missile launch to the highest arc in the parabola, where the warheads would explode.

The Choun Ohmonee (The Good Mother), Ninety-Three Miles West of San Francisco

Three hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone, the North Korean frigate, the Choun Ohmonee, got the launch codes for its missiles when the sun was barely setting. Still, the crewmen didn’t wait until it was dark to launch. Once they had received the codes, they knew they had only a few minutes to get the missiles in the air.

The modified cargo doors were pulled open, the launchers raised, the missiles readied to go.

The North Korean freighter launched its two Scud missiles a little more than forty seconds after her sister ship in the North Atlantic Ocean had fired its two Scud missiles. The two missiles burned their way upward, piercing the glowing sky. Like their predecessors, the missiles followed each other until passing through fifty-five thousand feet, then separated, the first one taking up a northern heading, the other tracking almost straight east.

North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), Inside Cheyenne Mountain, east of Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, Colorado

The Combat Operations Center came instantly to life, the huge screen at the front of the room illuminating the two missiles climbing over the east coast. A low growl filled the air from the warning buzzer overhead.

“Oh no, oh no,” the chief controller mumbled as he stared at the screen.

“What is it? What are they?” the commanding general demanded.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Where did they come from?”

“Launch point was—they share the same launch point—looks like eighty, maybe ninety miles off the coast—”

“Submarine-launched missiles? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

“It could be. They are ballistic—”

“What are their targets?”

Five seconds of hesitation. “We don’t know for certain, sir. The missiles are still in their climb phase. Their flight paths are not matching any of our parabolas. They’re going high, going high.”

The general thought a second. “Check your systems,” he said, his voice low and cold.

Another long moment of silence. Every eye in the Combat Operations Center watched the senior controller. “Sir,” he finally answered, “self-check complete. We have two confirmed bandits. Both of the missiles are still climbing.”

“That can’t be right,” the general answered. “Not when they were launched so close.”

The controller moved his cursor across his screen. “Final self-check complete,” he announced, finishing the last step in his checklist to confirm the missile launch.

The general’s face was utterly calm, but his mind raced ahead. “Get me Raven Rock,” he said as he turned to his chair.

Another warning chime. The enormous screen of the United States lit up again.

Two more missiles. Off the west coast. Climbing. Always climbing. One turning north, one heading east.

Twenty seconds of silence as the controllers and computers worked.

“The four missiles have taken up headings to hit our four major quadrants,” the lead controller said.

And that was all it took. The general finally understood.

Falling back in his chair, he gripped the armrest, realizing that the world, as they all knew it, was about to end.

TWENTY

Interstate 70, One Hundred Ten Miles East of Indianapolis

They headed west. Luke drove, his right hand on the wheel, his fingers nervously tapping it. Sara sat beside him, her hands resting calmly on her lap. Ammon crouched in the backseat of the Honda, leaning against the window, his eyes closed. He hadn’t spoken in a couple of hours, but Sara knew he was awake.

Traffic was heavy, the interstate clogged in both directions, though the heaviest line of cars was heading west. A long, slow, and discouraging day’s drive was behind them. The setting sun was directly ahead, the slanting rays burning through the front window. They didn’t talk as they drove, the Honda tires humming over the smooth interstate. Sara reached up and turned off the radio; every station played nothing but the news, repeating the same information again and again. The president was dead now, the vice president as well. The speaker of the House of Representatives and president pro tempore of the Senate were both alive but critically injured, leaving the secretary of state as the acting president. Occasional riots still flared up in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, but most of the other major cities had calmed down. Millions of people, with no real explanation, were fleeing the east coast. Everyone had a grandparent, a sibling, a distant relation, or a friend who lived away from the major cities, and those people were extraordinarily popular right now.

Behind them, almost four hundred miles to the east, Washington, D.C., one of the greatest cities in the world, smoldered, the smoke hanging over the area in a black, inky cloak. Thousands of volunteer firefighters had converged on the city, but there wasn’t much they could do. Downtown had nothing left to burn. The outskirts of the city still smoldered, but it was impossible to fight the fires with all the radioactive dust and contamination in the air. Most of the firefighters didn’t have anti-radiation suits and so they stood guard, waiting for the all clear to move in. Same for the rescue teams. There was little they could do, but they did what they could.

As the sun dropped, the sky before them turned a deep crimson, the upper atmosphere having been choked with thick dust from the nuclear explosions over Gaza; Washington, D.C.; and Iran. Luke moved both hands to the wheel and stretched his back against the seat. Sara leaned over to check the fuel gauge for the second time in the last five minutes, then sat back and closed her eyes. “We don’t want to go below half a tank,” she said.

Luke only nodded.

Most of the service stations they had passed were closed. SOLD OUT, NO VACANCY, and CLOSED signs seemed to be everywhere. The lines of cars at the few open stations back at Columbus had been blocks long. Four hours, five hours in line were the norm there, though it didn’t seem to be as bad once they got away from the population centers.

American society was as fragile and interconnected as a spider’s web; every hurricane, every snowfall, every hot summer day that stressed the electrical grid had the potential to bring an entire region to its knees. The transportation infrastructure was completely incapable of handling the sudden and massive migration that was taking place. Sara suspected many of the service stations that were closed still had fuel in their underground tanks but were unwilling to sell, hoarding for the next day when the prices would be higher and they could make even more.

She shook her head at the greed.

“Stay at home. There’s no reason to panic. Save your fuel and your resources,” was the official word out of Raven Rock. But the advice from the government spokesman didn’t mean a whole lot. No one trusted what was left of the federal government. It seemed like it was every man for himself now.

As they drove, Sara thought through their situation, considering their location and inventory of supplies. They were two days’ drive out of Washington, D.C., heading west. The protection of the Rocky Mountains was still at least thirty hours of driving away—if they could get gas, and if nothing else went wrong. They had enough food for a couple of weeks, but their water would last only a few more days. The seventy-two-hour emergency kit had been a lifesaver, but they could only stretch it so far. She glanced nervously over her shoulder to the trunk of the car. Ten thousand dollars cash—all that the bank had allowed her to withdraw at one time—was hidden under the spare tire in the trunk. They had wrapped the hundred-dollar bills in an old plastic bag and shoved it in the space where the tire jack had been stored, but she knew if someone were suspicious—or hungry, or angry, or greedy or mean, or desperate, or any of the dozens of emotions they had witnessed over the last two days—they could find the money. The package was just too big and awkward to hide it inside their little car. She thought of the cashier’s check tucked under her seat, another ten thousand dollars, good as cash in normal times, but who knew what it was worth right now? From what the radio said, it was 1929 all over again. Many financial institutions were refusing to hand out money, and the lines at the banks were almost as frenzied as the lines at the service stations and grocery stores.

The trunk was crammed with what remained of their seventy-two-hour emergency kit, extra food, their last case of bottled water, two ten-gallon red containers of fuel, winter clothes, sleeping bags, a tent, winter boots, rock-climbing equipment (Ammon had insisted on bringing the ropes, though Sara didn’t know why). The backseat held their suitcases, another bag of extra clothes and a set of Scriptures.

There was a sudden thump and the car shuddered. Sara jerked and looked quickly to the road, her hands gripping the dash anxiously.

Luke reached out to calm her. “It’s cool, Mom,” he said. “There was a shredded tire in the road. Nothing to worry about.”

Sara looked back, saw the next car roll over the piece of tire, then turned around in her seat.

Leaning over, she rechecked the gas gauge, then let her eyes drift toward her son. A Beretta 90-Two Type F handgun was hidden under Luke’s seat. Nine millimeter. Ten-round magazine. Black and gray. A full box of ammunition was stuffed in the glove compartment. She pictured the handgun’s beveled grip and shivered, hating the fact that it was so near.

She rested against the console between the two front seats and considered the gold coins hidden underneath her arm. Using their small toolbox, Ammon and Luke had removed the plastic console and hidden a metal box containing forty gold American Eagles, each weighing one ounce. Two weeks ago the gold would have been valued at something like sixty-eight thousand one hundred seventy-four dollars and forty cents. Today it was worth ten or twelve times that, maybe even more.

She didn’t know what made her more nervous, the hidden gold coins or the pistol. The pistol might keep them safe, she could accept that, but the gold—that could only bring them problems. If anyone knew they had it, if anyone even suspected… .

She shivered, almost wishing they had left the gold back in their home in Washington, D.C.

Home… home… her mind drifted back. The great old house in Washington, D.C. The wide, rolling lawn, Kentucky Bluegrass with Bermuda mixed in to keep it green against the southern heat. The enormous sycamore and oak trees, some of them dating back to the Civil War era. Ah, those beautiful trees, tall and broad and strong. She leaned against the headrest and closed her eyes.

The lawn… the old house… a popping fire in the fireplace in the winter… summer nights, warm and fragrant with honeysuckle… the sound of cicadas… .

She drifted away… .

The lawn was wet with dew. Neil was walking across the heavy grass in the darkness of the predawn light. The sun was an hour yet from rising, but the light from the streetlights illuminated his outline as he walked. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and his hair, wet from his morning shower, stuck to the middle of his forehead. He was dressed in his Air Force blues, an old leather briefcase tucked up under his arm. A government SUV and its driver were waiting for him at the curb. He stopped to pick up the newspaper, then turned. She was standing in the light of the kitchen window, and he smiled at her.

“I love you,” he mouthed, placing his hand at his heart.

“Neil, come back to me,” she whispered slowly.

He looked at her, flipped the paper up and caught it, then turned.

“I need to talk to you,” Sarah called out. “I need to know what you want me to do.”

The general kept walking toward the waiting car.

She turned from the window and ran toward the front door. “Neil, I’m not ready,” she cried, her voice choking. “I’m not ready for you to go. I don’t know what to do without you! I don’t know what to do!”

*******

She felt a warm hand on her shoulder. “It’s OK, Mom,” Ammon told her from the backseat. He was leaning forward. “It’s OK,” he gently assured her again.

She opened her eyes and shook her head. Luke split his attention between the road and his mother. “You OK, Mom?” he asked.

She shook her head again. “I’m fine. I’m fine. I must have fallen asleep.”

Ammon watched her carefully. “That’s good, Mom. I don’t think you’ve slept in days.”

She shrugged. “I’ve had plenty of sleep.”

Luke and Ammon glanced at each other. They both knew that wasn’t true.

Sara pushed a strand of hair from her eyes and stretched. Luke glanced at her as he drove. She was still beautiful—the years had been more than gracious—but it was clear that she wore a certain sadness now. A deep remorsefulness had settled into her eyes, and he wondered if it would ever go away.

She looked at him and smiled, then glanced into the backseat. “Ammon, could I have some of your bottled water?”

He reached to the cup holder built between the front and back seats and handed her a plastic bottle. “Here you go, Mom.”

She took a shallow sip, then handed the water back.

“Go ahead, Mom, you should drink it all.”

“No, we need to be careful—”

“We’ve got plenty of water, Mom. Enough for at least a couple of days. We’re going to be able to get more, I’m certain.” He pushed her hand back. “Go ahead. It’s OK. You can’t be silly. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

Sara smiled wearily. “Thank you, Doctor Spock,” she joked. But he didn’t take the water, and she finally drank it down, swallowing half the bottle in one long gulp.

*******

The road seemed long and lonely. A roll of low clouds, black and menacing, began building in the west. Occasional flashes of lightning illuminated the core of the thunderstorms, but without the summer’s heat they rose quickly and then faded, scattering into low but light-absorbing clouds. Minutes later, the car passed a green highway sign suspended over the freeway: INDIANAPOLIS 22 MILES. There, the highway split, Interstate 65 heading northwest toward Chicago, I-70 turning slightly south, bending toward St. Louis, then Kansas City, then the great Kansas plains, then Denver, and finally the towering Rocky Mountains to the west.

An exit with a couple of gas stations and a rest stop loomed ahead, glowing lights comforting against the cloudy afternoon. They continued on the freeway, coming after a short time to where the highway split, the two right lanes turning north toward Chicago.

Sara sat up suddenly. She stared, her mouth open, hesitating. Suddenly she cried, “Turn here!”

“No, Mom,” Luke answered, “we need to stay on I-70 heading west.”

The exit was coming fast and they were in the wrong lane.

“Turn here!” Sara repeated, almost reaching for the wheel. “Turn, Luke! Turn now!”

“But that will take us to Chicago. It isn’t the right way—”

The exit was almost upon them. The car on their right began to drift to the right, taking the exit at highway speed.

“Take the right lane, Luke. Take 65 toward Chicago. Please turn.”

It was too late. The exit was moving past them.

“Do it!” Ammon shouted from the backseat.

“Please, Luke!” Sara cried.

Luke jammed the wheel to the right. A screech of tires and car horn sounded from behind them. He felt the rubber on his wheels give, losing their grip on the road. He backed off, his left wheel almost dipping off the pavement, then pulled the car more gently through the turn. They made the exit, but barely, Sara gripping her seat belt at the shoulder while holding her breath.

A few seconds passed in silence.

“Why’d we do that, Mom?” Luke asked at last, glancing at her.

His mother didn’t answer.

“Mom, are you OK?”

Still she didn’t answer.

“Mom?”

“I’m fine, Luke.”

“You know we’re driving north now. We’re heading toward Chicago. This isn’t taking us any closer to where we want to be.”

“I know that, Luke.”

Another moment of silence.

“So… ?”

“I don’t know, Luke. I just had a feeling. I almost heard a voice. ‘Turn here. Go toward Chicago.’ It wasn’t something I came up with. I have no reason to head up here. I tried to fight it, it made no sense, but the feeling was so urgent.”

Ammon leaned forward from the backseat. “You did the right thing, Mom. No worries. We’ll just head north for a while and see what happens, then decide what to do from there.”

Luke scrunched his face. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Sara stared out her window, then turned. “Look around you, Luke. Does anything make any sense anymore? It might be that the only things that do make sense are the things we can’t make sense of. I heard the voice. I felt the Spirit. We have to trust the warnings. That’s the only thing we really have anymore.’

Luke nodded. “All right, then.”

Sara reached over and touched his shoulder. “We’ll do the best we can. It’ll be OK.”

*******

They drove for almost two hours. The sun disappeared below the distant horizon. The moon rose over the flat plains, blood-red and full. Sara turned and watched. It looked like an evil, bloody eye staring down from the sky. The night grew dark. The North Star drifted into view, slightly off to their right.

Sara stared at the red moon as she thought.

The landscape around them glittered with lights from farms and small towns tucked among the great Midwest plains. The clouds had blown and scattered and the sky was deep and full of stars. A dim light began to glow before them from the Chicago metropolis. Although it was still twenty miles in the distance, the massive cluster of lights lit up the entire northern sky.

“We ought to stop for gas,” Luke said. “The closer we get to the city, the harder it’s going to be to get it without having to wait for hours in line.”

Ammon pointed from the backseat. “The next exit. I see some lights. There are two or three stations up ahead.”

Luke saw them, half a mile east of the exit. He started to slow. “Looks like there are only a couple dozen cars in line.”

Sara nodded as he steered toward the off-ramp.

The flash was sudden and bright, white-hot, blazing and intense. It burst down from the night sky, leaving a yellow glow that quickly faded and then disappeared.

Everything fell silent. Their car stopped suddenly. No chug. No cough or sputter. It was as if someone had reached over and turned the key off. The Honda slowed, and Luke had to use both hands to steer it toward the side of the road.

Sara’s heart leapt into her throat. “What’s wrong?” she asked anxiously.

“I don’t know, Mom,” he answered.

The Honda coasted to the bottom of the off-ramp and rolled to a stop. Ammon sat forward in the backseat, staring at the instrument panel, which was completely dark. “How much gas did you have?” he asked.

“A little more than a quarter tank.”

“Try it again,” Sara said, her voice tight.

Luke turned the key. Nothing. Not a click. Not a sound. The engine didn’t turn.

“Could the gas gauge be wrong?” she wondered.

Ammon pushed himself farther forward. “You don’t have any headlights,” he said.

Luke turned the key again and again. Nothing. He sat back in exasperation.

“We’re not out of gas,” Ammon said. “If that was the problem, the battery would still turn the engine over. The battery would give us headlights. Maybe the alternator failed.”

Luke slapped the steering wheel in frustration. Sara fought to keep her stomach under control. Would they be able to find a mechanic? How much would it cost them? How long would it take?

Ammon looked around, then swallowed in sudden fear.

Something was wrong.

Really wrong.

The darkness around them was complete.

The lights from the gas stations had gone out. The streetlights at the bottom of the off-ramp, all the lights in the parking lots, the entire countryside had grown dark. No twinkling lights in the fields. Nothing to the east or west. He looked around desperately.

The glow from the distant lights of Chicago had also disappeared.

It was as if the entire world had fallen dark.

A power outage? Maybe. But if it was, it was a huge one, spreading across the entire area.

He sat back and thought.

Why would a power outage have affected their car?

He stole a glance ahead, expecting to see a long line of car lights on the road before them, but the whole freeway was perfectly dark. Turning, he looked behind them, peering through the back window. He could make out the shadows of the other cars in the moonlight, but none of them were moving. They were all at a standstill.

No headlights. No movement. The radio had gone quiet.

His heart began to pump like a hammer in his head. He leaned over, grabbed the handle, and pushed the door back, listening in the blackness.

Nearly perfect silence. The only sound a gentle breeze.

It was as if the entire world had gone away.

He thought some more and then groaned. He remembered now the time he spent replacing the car’s electrical components after the first bombs dropped.

Sara turned in the seat to look at him. “What is it!” she demanded, her voice steady but thick with fear.

“Try your cell phone,” he commanded.

Sara pulled her cell phone from her purse and flipped it open. “It looks like my batteries are dead.”

“Try yours, Luke.”

He reached into his pocket. “I’ve got nothing.” He pushed and held the on switch. “That’s kind of weird,” he said.

Ammon didn’t answer. Instead, he climbed out of the backseat. His mother and brother followed, meeting him at the front of the car.

Perfect darkness. Perfect silence. Not a light in the distance. No sound of passing cars.

Ammon’s face turned pale in the red moonlight, and Sara moved toward him. “What is it?” she pleaded. “Do you know what has happened? Do you know what’s going on?”

Ammon slowly nodded. Luke reached out for his arm. “What is it, Ammon?” he whispered.

Ammon leaned against the bumper, then lifted his hands to his face. “We’re not going west,” he told them. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Luke turned and looked around him, taking in the total darkness. The night was so quiet it was eerie. He shuddered and hunched his shoulders. “What happened, Ammon?”

“An EMP,” Ammon answered slowly.

“EMP? What is that?”

Before Ammon could answer, they heard a voice calling out from the darkness. Behind them, forty or fifty yards down the freeway, a car door slammed and a woman’s voice called again, “Please, can someone help me?”

Her voice was high and panicked. She was clearly terrified.

Ammon hesitated, staring at the emptiness behind them, then turned to Luke. “Come on,” he said.

They started moving toward the voice that was sounding from the darkness. Sara grabbed Ammon’s arm as he moved away from her, slipping her fingers down to grasp his wrist. “Be careful,” she said, squeezing his arm. “You don’t who it is or what they want.”

Ammon turned toward her. “We’ll be fine, Mom.” He nodded to Luke and started walking. Luke followed him. Ammon stumbled, almost tripping over the shoulder in the road where the asphalt dropped away to meet the gravel, the darkness deep around him, cave-like and complete. “Hey,” he shouted. “Hey there, can you hear me?”

“Yes! Yes! I can hear you. Can you help me?”

The voice was not far away now, just ten or twenty yards. He slowed and waited. “I’m here,” he said. “There are two of us. Can we help you?”

A small black woman emerged from the darkness, a fragile shadow in the starlight. “My car has stopped.”

Ammon shrugged. “So has ours,” he answered carefully. “I’m sure everything’s going to be OK, though. Sometime soon, they’ll send some help.” He was lying now and he knew it and his voice cracked because he wasn’t any good at it. “Don’t worry; I’m sure everything will be just—”

“No,” the woman interrupted him. “Look around you. Everything has stopped. No cars. No lights. It’s like there’s nothing out there.” She gestured around her with her arms. “It isn’t right.” She was silent a long moment, then took a step toward him, looking at his face. “I don’t know what to do now. Please, I have two daughters.”

Ammon looked past the small woman, searching for her daughters, but there was no one there.

Mary Shaye Dupree reached out to him. “I was coming back from a special clinic down in Columbus when my car stopped.” She looked around. “I have a little girl. She is sick. I’ve got to get her home.”

Luke bit his lip as he moved to her side. “I’m sorry, but that’s going to be a little difficult right now. But I’m sure—”

“She’s got to have her medication. I only brought enough for two days. If I don’t get her home, if she doesn’t get her medication… .” her voice slowly trailed off.

Luke shifted on his feet, a heavy weight seeming to fall on him. Things were bad enough with just the three of them. What could they do for her? “Your daughter, is she OK?” he asked, sensing Mary’s anguish.

“No. No, she’s not. Please, can you help me?”

Ammon’s jaw tightened up as he turned to Luke. His brother stood back, unsure of what to do.

Mary watched them hopefully. Then, sensing their helplessness and indecision, she reached up, covered her mouth, and breathed deeply, her shoulders shivering with despair.

TWENTY-ONE

The missiles reached their target locations: two hundred eighty-five miles high and spread out evenly across the United States, the coordinates roughly corresponding to northern Idaho, the Four Corners, Detroit, and Nashville. Once the missiles had reached their preprogrammed coordinates, they exploded at almost exactly the same time.

Each of the missiles carried a fifty-kiloton warhead, the equivalent of fifty thousand tons of TNT, one hundred million pounds of explosive power.

Inconceivable heat and overpressure spread across the lower reaches of space from the growing fireballs. But the heat and radiation were not the purpose of the explosions, for they were not dangerous to human life, not at such a high altitude.

No, this attack wasn’t designed to kill Americans from either heat or an explosion. It was designed to kill Americans by starving them to death.

As the warheads exploded, an electromagnetic tsunami swept across North America. From the southern edge of Canada to central Mexico, extending as far south as the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, four crashing waves of electromagnetic power burst across the sky.

*******

In addition to heat and overpressure, a nuclear explosion also generates a massive burst of electromagnetic energy known as an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. When such a surge of X rays and gamma rays are unleashed at the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, they interact with the Earth’s magnetic field, creating an enormous burst of highly charged electrons. The final result is an enormous pulse of energy.

The electromagnetic shock wave generated by the four simultaneous nuclear explosions was unimaginably intense, a hundred million times more powerful than any radio signal ever before created by man. This massive wave of energy raced toward the surface of the earth at the speed of light, destroying every unprotected electrical circuit in its path.

A thousandth of a second after the explosions, the destruction was complete.

*******

Sometime in the spring of 2005, the United States government came to an incredible conclusion. Almost entirely unreported (which didn’t really matter for there was very little anyone could do about it anyway), the findings of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology, and homeland security were synopsized in the Washington Post:

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the American homeland… is one of only a few ways that the United States could be defeated by its enemies—terrorist or otherwise. And it is probably the easiest. A single Scud missile, carrying a single nuclear weapon, detonated at the appropriate altitude, would interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating down to the surface at the speed of light. Depending on the location and size of the blast, the effect would be to knock out already stressed power grids and other electrical systems across much or even all of the continental United States, for months if not years.

. . . [T]he loss of power would have a cascading effect on all aspects of U.S. society. Communication would be largely impossible. Lack of refrigeration would leave food rotting in warehouses, exacerbated by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still working simply ran out of gas (which is pumped with electricity). The inability to sanitize and distribute water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention the safety of anyone in the path of the inevitable fires, which would rage unchecked. And as we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, such circumstances often result in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order.

. . . .

Those who survived… would find themselves transported back to the United States of the 1880s.

This threat may sound straight out of Hollywood, but it is very real. CIA Director Porter Goss recently testified before Congress about nuclear material missing from storage sites in Russia that may have found its way into terrorist hands… . Iran has surprised intelligence analysts by describing the mid-flight detonations of missiles fired from ships on the Caspian Sea as “successful” tests. North Korea exports missile technology around the world; Scuds can easily be purchased on the open market for about $100,000 apiece.

A terrorist organization might have trouble putting a nuclear warhead “on target” with a Scud, but it would be much easier to simply launch and detonate in the atmosphere. No need for the risk and difficulty of trying to smuggle a nuclear weapon over the border or hit a particular city. Just launch a cheap missile from a freighter in international waters—al Qaeda is believed to own about 80 such vessels—and make sure to get it a few miles in the air.

. . . .

Today few Americans can conceive of the possibility that terrorists could bring our society to its knees by destroying everything we rely on that runs on electricity. But this time we’ve been warned… .

([Senator] Jon Kyl, “Unready For This Attack,” Washington Post, April 16, 2005, A19, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57774-2005Apr15.html)

*******

Microseconds after the four warheads exploded, all across the United States, electrical conductors and generators were destroyed. Transmission lines were rendered useless. Computers and microchips were instantly burned through. In a fraction of a second, the United States of America was transplanted back to the preindustrial world.

Electronic banking as well as the financial information on 300 million Americans was instantly vaporized, disappearing in a puff of digital smoke. With a flash of unseen light, the United States became a cash-only world.

At the time of the explosions, there were a few more than three thousand four hundred civilian airliners in the sky. (Had the explosions occurred just a few hours earlier, at the height of the afternoon aviation rush, the number of airborne aircraft would have exceeded five thousand.) None of the electrical circuits inside these aircraft were designed to withstand an electromagnetic pulse. As a result, the flight controls, navigation equipment, GPS, radars, cockpit displays, and electronic engine controllers were rendered useless. Most of these aircraft crashed.

Thirty-two hundred aircraft. On average, one hundred fifty passengers apiece.

Six hundred forty thousand Americans dead.

But tens of millions of other deaths would follow, for the entire nation was now just a few months away from mass starvation, completely incapable of feeding itself. The ability to plant, harvest, or transport food, the ability to purify and provide clean water, the ability to provide for the most basic needs had been instantly stripped away.

And that was just the beginning.

Medical instruments, hospital power generators, electronic ignitions inside tractor-trailer trucks and family automobiles, controllers inside the diesel engines on locomotives, cell phones, televisions, refrigeration units, the infrastructure for handling power, fuel, energy, banking and finance, telecommunications, emergency services—all of it was gone.

Four simple warheads—none of them more sophisticated or any larger than those designed during WWII—were all it took to bring the greatest nation on earth to its knees.

COMING IN EPISODE SIX…

READ IT NOW: www.mercuryink.com

Think about Hurricane Katrina. That was one city that was hit, a couple hundred thousand people. The rest of the nation was unaffected except for some other areas along the Gulf Coast. The federal government was functioning—it hadn’t just been hit by a nuke over Washington, D.C. Yet look what happened down there. It took days to get even the most basic things, days to provide food and water. Months to bring back power. Years to clean up the mess. That was one city, Mom, helped by the whole rest of the nation, yet look how long it took.

*******

Sam moved his flashlight left and right. A ten-foot, razor-topped fence ran parallel to the tracks. Beyond the fence, on both sides, there was a freeway. They were in the median. The train station was ahead.

They heard voices all around them. From the station. From the road. But there were no lights, no moving cars, no streetlights, no headlights, no lights in the windows of the buildings that rose up on either side.

“Oh no… oh no…” Bono muttered.

Sam shot him a look of confusion. “It can’t be,” he answered. “There’s no way it’s what you’re thinking!”

*******

The four men had reached the end of the platform where it met the tracks, their images illuminated by the moon and stars. At the edge of the cement barricade three of them dropped and kept on walking, but the fourth one stopped and turned around.

“My name is Balaam!” he cried. “I remember you, my brothers, and I will see you again.”

The coldness deepened, sinking into Bono’s soul. He lifted his right hand and was about to reply, but the man dropped onto the train tracks and walked into the dark.

*******

“Go to Chicago, Sam.” He stepped forward and pointed with his finger, tapping the map. “Stay on the south side of the city. You will know what to do.”

Sam’s eyes were drawn to the map. “Sir, what are you talking about?”

“Listen to me, Samuel Brighton.”

Sam hesitated, almost afraid to answer. “Chicago? Why Chicago! That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Trust me, Sam. Chicago. They will be waiting. You have to save their lives.”

*******

Azadeh froze, her eyes wide, her face full of wonder, her mouth opened in a silent cry.

The American soldier looked down at her. “Do you remember me?” he asked.

Azadeh didn’t move. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t talk. It took every ounce of energy just to breathe.

Yes, she remembered him.

*******

READ EPISODE SIX NOW…

http://www.mercuryink.com

Table of Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE