The two men watched her head for their car, one of the new Mustang convertibles. “ Tony, I'm sorry if this mess has ruined your evening but Klavdia's presence was an advantage we couldn't neglect. She's probably saved a lot of lives tonight. I'd offer her a reward or something, but it might offend her. Any suggestions?”
“ Don't worry about the evening, we were going to see Judy Garland and Jane Russell in Anna Karenina but tomorrow will do. If you want to make Klavdia really happy, see if you can find her an Ikon, a real one. They're rare in Russia, the communists burned most of them and the Germans destroyed most of those left. The Russians take their religion really seriously now.
But, Captain, what the hell happened here? I grew up here and I don't remember anything like this ever happening before.”
“ Nor me Tony, and I've been living here a lot longer than you. On the surface, well, my head is telling me it’s just some nutcase out to make a statement, but my gut disagrees and says it's a lot worse than that. I got a feel there is something here we don't understand yet, can't tell you how I know that, but I do.”
Captain Novak lay broke off for a minute and took a message from a state trooper. “ You know The Manor?” Evans nodded; it was reputed to be the best restaurant in South Carolina, “ The owner has asked you and Klavdia to be his guests there for dinner. Any time you like and as often as you like. His kid was in that room.”
Town Square, Yaffo, Palestine.
The square was filled with howls and the weird ululating noises the local women made at such events. The hysteria in the crowd was building constantly, even though the glare of the noonday sun was painful as it reflected off the white-washed buildings and glass windows. Dispersed throughout the crowd were the agitators, who made sure that the fever of the crowd was constantly being stoked. The crowd itself had long since ceased to be made up of individuals and now had a life of its own, a life that blotted out the minds and feelings of its constituent parts. The agitators, though, had another function. Anybody who didn't show the required frenzy would be singled out for investigation. Next week, the crowd could be gathering for them.
Then, the doors of the court building were opened and the condemned were thrown out. They were a family, or so the posted verdicts had said, but they had been so badly beaten that it was impossible to determine whether they were young or old, male or female. Had anybody in the crowd been detached enough, they could probably have guessed at the victim's ages by relative size but if anybody was capable of doing so they hid it well. The condemned wore only torn rags so somebody who retained the ability to see clearly might have been able to pick out the women but any who could do so hid that as well. It didn't matter anyway,
the condemned were all dead no matter what their age or sex. They just hadn't stopped breathing yet.
The guards dragged the victims through the crowd, taking their time about it so those nearest the path could throw stones at or spit on the condemned family. If they had been so minded, if the dynamics of crowd behavior had been less overwhelming, the more perceptive members of the crowd might have spotted some very strange things about those guards. They spoke to each other in a strange, guttural language, one that completely lacked the lilting melody that made Arabic a pleasure to hear. Some of them had blue eyes and fair hair, most had skin that was reddened from the sun rather than bronzed. All of them were large, powerful men who handled their victims with the brutal efficiency of long practice.
Once through the screaming crowd, the victims were hauled to stakes in the middle of the square and shackled to them. Brushwood and kindling was already waiting and it only took moments to stack it around them. That was another strange aspect about the scene for those with the wits to see it; execution by fire was a European practice, not a Middle Eastern one. Who would burn valuable wood just for executions? Had any members of the crowd retained the ability to analyze the events taking place in front of them they might have wondered just what was going here. This was a ritual execution, shouldn't stoning be the method used? But, questions were irrelevant and asking them was dangerous.
The strange men, the 'Guardians of the Faith,’ lit the tires. The chanting and howling in the square reached a new pitch of excitement, drowning out the screams inside the fires. The black smoke drifted across the square and into the sky. 80,000 feet higher, an aircraft with absurdly long wings turned again, its gyro-stabilized cameras recording the scene below. Nobody in Yaffo Town Square knew they were being filmed, and none of them would have cared if they had known.
Main Conference Room, National Security Council Building, Washington D. C.
The film projector shut off with a series of clicks that echoed around the silent room. “ That must be the most horrible
thing I have ever seen.” President Lyndon Baines Johnson's voice was shaking “ I never believed I would see human beings being publicly barbecued in the twentieth century. Who were those poor people? And, how did we get this film?”
“ Mister President, answering your last question first, for twenty years it has been Strategic Aerospace Command policy -and the policy of the United States of America- that SAC aircraft go where they wish and do what they want. We call this policy “ Open Skies,” by which we mean, of course, that other people's skies are open to us. Now, other nations are used to that policy, most accept it, some resent it but more welcome the sight of our bombers overhead.
“ We make a point of taking film and giving copies to the governments in question. This means they can make accurate maps of their countries, something we take for granted but many countries have never seen before. We can spot water resources and other national assets. In fact, some countries find our aerial photography so valuable they actually ask us to over-fly them and pay us for the products. In this case, though, the imagery you have seen was taken by a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Its flight was not welcomed, but those underneath could do nothing about it.
“ The victims of this dreadful event were a Moslem Imam and his entire family. He'd been running an escape route for Jews hiding out in Palestine, up the coast through Lebanon and into Turkey. Whether somebody informed on him or the authorities found out some other way, we'll probably never know. I must admit I thought that the Jewish population of Palestine had already been exterminated when the Jewish settlements in the area were overrun but it appears that a significant number went into hiding. We have now learned that the Moslem population has organized a substantial underground movement dedicated to helping them escape. Obviously the ruling authorities regard the existence of that movement as a serious threat to their rule so they have gone to great lengths to stamp it out.
“ Those performing the executions are part of an organization called 'The Guardians of the Faith'. There are some highly anomalous features of these murders. For example, they bear far more resemblance to the legends of the Spanish Inquisition or the European witch trials than any part of Islamic culture. This is because the 'Guardians of the Faith' are Europeans. We know them better as Einsatzkommando. When Model and the survivors of his army escaped from southern Russia a few years back, the SS Einsatzkommado escaped with him. They found refuge in what is now the Caliphate, Model's troops have become a sort of Praetorian Guard for the Caliphate leaders. The Einsatzkommando became the 'Guardians of the Faith” and, as we can see, are carrying on the same old way.”
The Seer thought for a moment. “ In fact, there is quite a culture clash here. It's pretty obvious that Model's people don't really understand the people they are living with and their hosts don't understand them. This execution by fire we've been watching is a good example of that phenomenon. It's so bizarre as to be almost inexplicable in local terms and it highlights just how alien these 'Guardians of the Faith' really are and that's going to cause a lot of tension in the medium term. Be that as it may, it would appear that this atrocity was intended as a public example of what anybody who helps the 'ungodly' escape the 'Guardians of the Faith' can expect. Not just them, but their entire families. The Jewish family in question here were simply executed, beheaded as we understand, along with a number of Druze from the Lebanon and a few others.