"If I have to be locked up with imperialists," Sky said, "I guess I'd prefer dead ones. I feel a strong urge to meditate coming on. This whole trip is getting very, very heavy."
The guard paused at a rude door marked by a small window bisected by iron bars. A faint pounding came from the other side.
"What is this?" said the guard, putting his face to the bars.
Instantly a quartet of black arms grabbed his face, his throat, and his epaulets. He screamed, dropping a ring of keys. Sky grabbed this and shrank into a corner as the guard was methodically throttled to death.
When he was still, Sky slipped up to the bars.
"Hello, in there," she hissed. "Are you political prisoners?"
"Yes." The voice was dead. "Open the door."
"Coming right up," said Sky, fumbling for the right key.
She pulled on a thick iron ring and the door creaked open.
To her openmouthed astonishment, out stepped a woman with matted hair and skin the color of coal dust. She was nude. Her red eyes blazed in Sky's direction.
"Far out!" Sky said in a thick voice, not quite registering the lean apparition's four arms. "What did they do to you? I mean, how can I help you, you poor oppressed thing?"
The red eyes bored into her. One hand lifted, curling so that a single finger pointed at her.
"Give me that."
Sky touched her hair. "You mean my headband?"
"Yes. It is my favorite color."
"Sure," said Sky, whipping the yellow ribbon from her hair. As she held it out, she asked, "It won't cover much, you know."
"Just your neck, " said Kali, who fell upon Sky Bluel like an ebony spider clutching a strand of yellow webbing.
As she was slowly throttled to the cold stone floor, Sky gurgled inarticulately. In that respect, she died as she had lived.
Chapter 38
The command went out.
All over Irait, mobile Scud launchers rumbled out of places of concealment. Crews sent their missiles lifting skyward on their rail launchers like a hundred symbols of Arab sexual prowess. Coordinates were programmed into on-board targeting computers.
More than one devout soldier, recognizing the significance of those coordinates, wept openly and cursed the name of Maddas Hinsein.
At air bases from the Kurani border to the frontier with Turkey, from Syria to the west and Iran to the east, pilots leapt into the Soviet MiG 29's and French-built F-1 Mirage fighters, as ground crews frantically affixed chemical payloads to bomb racks and wing mounts.
The flight that would send the world at last into the Red Abyss of Hell was about to be launched. At the command of one man.
It happened that Yussef Zarzour commanded the first Scud to lift off. The massive coordinated strike was supposed to launch simultaneously, but Zarzour was still flushed with the success of his elimination of the 324th Data Processing Cohort, and could not wait to taste of new glory.
Had he known that his Scud was aimed at Jerusalem, he would have instantly reprogrammed it to demolish the Palace of Sorrows. But he was ignorant of that fateful fact.
Hunkered in the shelter of a rock outcropping, he listened for the roar of the rising missile, setting himself for the seismic blast of superheated air and exhaust gases. His fingers were jammed into his dirty ears.
The long thunder of the Scud's plume never came. Zarzour was counting off the seconds. He kept counting. The number twenty should have signified liftoff. He stopped at fifty-five.
He stuck his head up from the rocks.
The Scud simply stood there pointing to the blue sky. It had not cleared the launch rail. Smoke dribbled from the tail. It was gray and lazy.
As Yussef Zarzour watched, the Scud suddenly came apart in a flower of noise, burning rocket fuel and shrapnel.
A sharp shingle of the latter whisked his head off his neck. His crouched body didn't so much as twitch as the shrapnel executed a textbook surgical strike. It was found months later, still in a crouched position, birds pecking at the raw stump between his inert shoulders.
Other Scuds did lift off throughout Irait. They executed parabolas, loops, and arcs that would have astounded their Soviet builders.
These acrobatics terrified the gaping crew chiefs, some of whom fell victim to their own weapons as the rockets careened and tumbled, wildly out of control, back to ground with explosive results.
Scuds blew up on their rails. Or landed hundreds of kilometers short of their targets. Some never got erect. As the rails toiled skyward, they snapped as if brittle with age. In those cases, crews discovered the heavy steel rail launchers had actually crumbled as if from the elements.
In other instances, after successfully erecting, the rails collapsed due to the vibration of launch. Since the Scud was never designed for horizontal launching, this was particularly disastrous to surrounding crews, buildings, and natural rock formations.
Iraiti pilots fared no better. Mirages, towed from their revetments, suffered acute damage during that simple procedure. Nose cones fell off. Landing gear collapsed. Bomb-laden MiG wings dropped loose at their roots, releasing nerve gases on ground crews.
A few Iraiti Air Force jets did get off the ground. Rudders and elevators came off under the G-force strain of takeoff. Wings were sheared off for no apparent reason. Canopies flew away in flight, forcing pilots to eject where they could.
More than one Iraiti pilot was doomed to ride his precision fighter down into the smoking hole that was to become his grave, cursing Soviet workmanship and Maddas Hinsein by turns.
It was as if the hand of God had interceded to save the world from one megalomaniac's nightmare ambition. For no one could understand how the entire Iraiti Air Force and its rocketry units could misfire simultaneously.
Especially President Maddas Hinsein, who shot dead the first two ministers who informed him to his face of the most crushing defeat in Iraiti history.
When he ran out of ministers to shoot, he promoted his personal driver, a corporal in the Renaissance Guard, to defense minister and had the trembling man drive him to a Scud site south of Abominadad, which had misfired but was still intact.
When the Scud crew saw the white limousine of their Precious Leader coming up the road, they formed a circle and drew their service pistols in unison. At the count of three, they opened fire on the center of the circle.
The center was empty. Their bloody bodies soon filled it.
President Maddas Hinsein stepped over the bodies with grim unconcern. He strode up to the inert Scud, squinting at it.
There was a long black squiggle running up one side of the Scud. He had to tilt his head to make it out.
It was a name. An unfamiliar name. The script was so large it curled around the tubular rocket's body almost to the point of being unreadable, forcing the Scimitar of the Arabs to walk around the launcher in order to read it in full.
The script read: "NISEEN."
"Who is this Niseen?" roared Maddas Hinsein, shaking his fist.
"I do not know, Precious Leader," replied the new defense minister.
"Then have every man in Irait named Niseen executed at once!"
"At once, Precious Leader," said Defense Minister Niseen Ammash, who threw his ID cards out the window during the drive back to the Palace of Sorrows and swore to himself that he would go by the name of Toukan for the rest of his days.
He figured that would take him through Tuesday.
Chapter 39
The launch plumes dappling the Iraiti landscape were visible from orbit. Central Intelligence Agency analysts counted over a thousand-which puzzled them because it was more than double the number of Scuds known to be in the Iraiti inventory.
It took hours, but they figured out that some of the flashes were not launch plumes but points of impact. All were well within the borders of Irait, another puzzle.