The pilot saw the approaching threat and made a fast climbing turn to get away but the missile followed him, homing in on the heated exhaust of the engine. The warhead explosion wasn’t great, the missile was too small for that, but it was enough to cripple the tail rotor. The helicopter spun out of control, stalled out and crashed in the middle of Port Said Road.
“Sehr Gut.” The gunner’s assistant clapped him on the back then started to reload the launcher. It was the work of a minute to slide another round into the tube, plug in the connector and ready the second missile for tiring. Two slaps on the gunner’s shoulder and another lethal surprise was waiting for the next Gendarmerie helicopter to show its face.
Further along the line of buildings, more two-man crews left their cover. With the threat of the helicopter gone, they could do something about the armored cars with their deadly heavy machine-guns. The crews were armed with Type 19s, a Chipanese copy of the Russian RPG-2 anti-tank rocket. Not a particularly accurate weapon but the range wasn’t that great. The warhead didn’t have that much penetration either but the armor on the Gendarmerie vehicles was intended to stop rifle fire at the most.
The rockets streaked out from the rooftops, heading for the Gendarmerie positions on the west side of the Port Said Road. A boiling cloud of black and orange marked the spot where one of the armored cars had been hit and penetrated. More salvos shot out, more of the little armored cars were hit. Then, the mob boiled out from the east side of Port Said Road and howled its way across. This time, with the concentrated machine-gun fire broken, they made it and started to spread through the maze of small sidestreets and alleys.
The gendarmerie had no choice, they had to pull back. The mob was already bypassing their positions, threading through the streets and threatening to isolate the armored cars and riot control troops. As the blue vehicles fell back, the local population saw what was happening and hysteria ran rampant. They also streamed for the west and the illusory safety of the river.
The mob had broken through opposite the El Ezbekiya part of the city, the area largely inhabited by Coptic Christians. Those that dropped everything and ran for their lives would make it to the river. Those that stopped for anything, for a vital document, a possession or a member of the family did not. The mob ran them down and tore them to shreds. It was start of a massacre that would go on for days.
In the northern part of the El Ezbekiya, the great Coptic Cathedral was already in flames. Some of the Christian inhabitants had sought sanctuary within its walls, now they died there as the cathedral was burned with them inside. Further to the west another part of the mob burst into the Egyptian Museum and started the destruction of its contents. As thousands of years of Egyptian history, from priceless relics of the earliest Pharaohs to a portrait of King Farouk, were smashed, burned, and shredded, the Curator begged one of the black-turbaned Mullahs to stop the devastation. “We need nothing other than Islam” was the only reply he got before the mob tore the Curator and his family apart. Even before he died, the entire museum complex was already ablaze.
For it was fire that marked the passage of the rebel horde through El Ezbekiya. The front line of their advance could be traced by fire, burning buildings, overturned vehicles and the funeral pyres of people unfortunate enough to have been caught in the street. From above, it would have looked like a burning map, with the brown, charring edge of the paper preceding the flames being the people desperately running for shelter. The whole mass of refugees from the El Ezbekiya were funneling in on two bridges that lead to one of the islands in the center of the Nile. Those who faltered or hesitated were crushed under the stampeding humanity. There was no way that the bridges could carry the mass of people trying to escape over them. It was only the small groups of Gendarmerie still desperately trying to hold back the swarming rioters that allowed as many to escape as they did.
The other thing that saved some of the refugees was that they were running west while the mob was swinging south, towards the Abdin. There, the occupants had warning from the fate of the occupants of El Ezbekiya and had started their flight early. Also, the roads out were better, wider and there were three bridges, not two. Adding in the greater number of Gendarmerie and the lack of narrow alleyways for the mob to infiltrate past their positions, things were in the Abdin’s favor.
Most of the government, bank and insurance company people there managed to escape, first to the Geziret island, then to the west bank of the Nile. Nevertheless, by evening all of Cairo on the East Bank of the Nile was in the hands of the Mullahs and their mob. The Egyptian National radio station was also in their hands and, from it, their leader made his broadcast. Claiming to be a representative of the pious Egyptian people who had risen up against the idolaters and blasphemers who had subverted the country, he begged all good Islamic countries to send the Egyptian people help in their effort to bring their country back to the true faith. As it happened, he was an Iranian who had arrived in Egypt for the first time three days before, but surrounded by the burning city and the screams of the massacre, that seemed an unimportant detail.
The Oval Office, The White House, Washington
“Dean, what the hell are we going to do about this? Perhaps State can give me an straight answer. All I’ve had from the Attorney General is a lecture on human rights and the infamy of the Egyptian government and the Secretary of Defense keeps telling me if we’d done things his way, this would never have happened. The National Security Advisor keeps telling me ‘on the one hand this, on the other hand that’ and outlining options. Will somebody give me a straight damned answer to a simple question?”
“Mister President, in defense of the National Security Advisor, we pay The Business to study problems and outline the available options and their probable consequences. Then we, as the Cabinet, select the options we think are best. The Business doesn’t set policy sir. We do that.
“In this case, our options are pretty limited. The Egyptian Government is collapsing and has lost control of most of the country. An hour ago we received word that the Sudanese Government has applied to join the Caliphate. Already, Sudanese “volunteers” are crossing the border in large numbers to assist their “brothers” in Egypt. We anticipate Somalia will follow very soon.
“If we’re going to intervene, we are going to have to do so in force and do so very quickly or there won’t be anybody to intervene on behalf of. I understand we have a Marine brigade in the Eastern Mediterranean that we could land in Egypt but that’s hardly enough to make any difference. If this was a regular war, we could flatten the entire Caliphate in hours but that isn’t the case. To straighten Egypt out at this point, we’d need a massive and infinite-duration deployment and we just don’t have the troops. To get the troops, we’d have to gut our strategic offensive and defensive forces and that would harm our position all over the world.
“Anyway its really questionable if we could do it. It’s that industrial thing again, sir, we were out of power for twenty years and we’re only now getting a handle on what the situation really is. The machine tool shortage is the problem and its hitting us all over. We came into office with plans and priorities and everywhere we’ve gone we’ve found that damned industrial bottleneck is strangling us.