Chah Bahar was a peaceful village on the sea. Ahmed had gone home on leave to see his wife and four-year-old son Nadhar. The sun was warm as he walked the street with his family hours before he had to fly back to Ashkhabad.
Abruptly out of the south, the sound of jet engines, too big and heavy for UIF jets. His ears were filled with the sounds of the Western Coalition Stealth bombers, the whistle of the descending cluster bombs, the oddly muffled cough from his wife as the shrapnel hit her. He felt himself running, Nadhar’s body in his arms. As the first bombs hit, he and Nadhar fell to the dirt, Ahmed on top, the bombs exploding around them. His ears rang from the low pass of a black bomber. He braced himself as the fuel-air explosive canister hit the ground and detonated, the explosion smashing into him. He felt the impact of shrapnel, then the conflagration sucked the air out of the sky, leaving him gasping, certain he was moments from death, but finally the flames faded and he drank in the air. Even before he looked Ahmed sensed his son had been hit by the shrapnel. And Col. Rakish Ahmed, supreme commander of the Combined Air Forces of the United Islamic Front of God and chief of staff to General-and-Khalib Mohammed al-Sihoud was obliged to watch as his son died. The final wave of Stealth bombers flew over then, their bellies full of another round of cluster bombs.
Ahmed was forced to leave Nadhar’s body and run for cover.
His anger and grief would coalesce into a hunger for revenge … his understanding that his own personal loss was shared by thousands his troops had left fatherless never really occurred to him …
In the broken service tunnel of the headquarters bunker, Ahmed’s uniform was soaked in cold sweat. His heart was pounding, his breath wheezed. The vision of the smoking ruins of Chah Bahar vanished in a swirling storm of dots, yellow and red and blue dots.
He shook his head, slowly realizing he had been unconscious, unable to escape the Chah Bahar nightmare even when knocked out by an enemy attack on the bunker. He heard rushing noises, dripping noises … the noise of air as it rushed in and blew out. The sounds grew in volume.
Choking, rasping, retching noises filled the dark space. He tried to move, going nowhere at first, feeling pressure from something lying on top of him. A slick feel against a harder surface. A liquid. Blood or water.
He tried again to move, trying his arm first, surprised when it followed his command. His other arm, then his legs.
He tried to get up but was pinned. He tried to roll, and felt a jagged piece of steel jab into his ribs. He rolled the other way and felt pressure ease up, allowing him to breathe.
There was still no light, but another sound, a spurting, sprinkling noise.
The attack on the bunker had come, as Ahmed had predicted.
The tunnel, their intended escape route, had partially collapsed, its concrete upper half smashed to dust by the fist of the explosions. What had been the floor of the tunnel was littered with smashed pieces of concrete, sand, dirt, wires and cables. No sign of Sihoud.
It hit him then … Sihoud was dead, and with him the hopes of the thirty nations and half billion people of the Union. The United Islamic Front, in minutes, had been doomed. The attack had, as Ahmed feared, been a decapitation.
Because without Mohammed al-Sihoud, everything was lost. Ahmed heard his own voice call out for the Khalib.
Soon his voice was drowned by another sound. What before had been a spritzing sound, a dim noise of rain, now became a sound of rushing force. The water pipe, which had once fed the bunker, had ruptured and was flooding the remains of the utility tunnel. The water had submerged his face, and he twisted into a violent roll. The same piece of steel jabbed into his ribs, and he decided he would rather be stabbed to death by the reinforcing steel in the chunk of concrete that held him down than be drowned by the water line.
The steel cut into him, ripping open the skin at his ribs, cutting into muscle and scraping bone, coming close to puncturing the lung beneath the bone, until his chest was no longer in contact with the metal, only the smooth underside of the concrete chunk. By then the water had risen over Ahmed’s prone body. He continued to twist and felt his back scrape across the concrete block. In a corner of his mind, prepared for death, he realized that he was free. He pumped his legs and pushed with his hands and was able to half-stand.
His head splashed out of the water into the damp darkness of the half-collapsed tunnel, water up to his waist. He had to find Sihoud. He had to shut off the flooding water. He had to get them out of the tunnel. He had to get Sihoud to a place of safety. As he searched in the rising water for Sihoud, he realized it would be no good merely to get the Khalib to another command post, to a field battlefield company.
What had happened would happen again and again until the enemy had achieved their goal of killing Sihoud and decapitating the Union. He had to find the one place on earth where the coalition’s commandos and assassins would be unable to reach him. The water, the rising water in the tunnel, had keyed a dim memory in Ahmed’s mind, but as yet he was uncertain what the connection was. And then it suddenly seemed obvious. Sihoud had to go into exile, much as the Prophet Himself had gone into exile to Medina almost fourteen centuries before. The Prophet’s exile had been called the hegira, and so would Sihoud’s. And like the Prophet Mohammed, Sihoud would return in glory, not with horses and swords but with high-altitude radar-invisible supersonic cruise missiles loaded with radioactive plutonium.
Five steps down the tunnel Ahmed tripped on something.
He reached down into the water, grabbed hold, and pulled with all his strength. Sihoud had been trapped under a piece of metal, but he must have been unconscious because the metal rolled off easily. His head came out of the water. He was not breathing. Ahmed leaned Sihoud’s face back and clamped his lips on the lips of the Khalib and blew.
As the water rose in the tunnel, Ahmed felt the broken concrete tunnel begin to shift, the water undermining footing in the packed sand. He continued to blow into Sihoud’s mouth. The water continued to rise. How long could he try to bring life back to Sihoud before giving up and trying to save himself? But then he thought that no decision was in fact a decision. Without Sihoud there was no hope for the UIF or for Ahmed himself, and with the war lost, Sihoud and Ahmed’s family dead, what was there to live for?
Sihoud suddenly stiffened and expelled water.
It was well past three o’clock in the morning and something was seriously wrong. Airman Abdul Djaliz squinted at the horizon where the smoke and flames were dying out but still discernible over the dim light of the few sodium arc lights illuminating the asphalt at Ashkhabad’s Sunni Air Base.
It had been perhaps forty minutes before that the call had come from the main bunker HQ to pull the most airworthy Firestar fighter from the hangar, warm it up, and load liquid helium into the electronic warfare pod’s tank. That had taken only fifteen minutes. The sleek swept-winged jet sat on the pad, her turbines purring smoothly, the heat haze from the exhaust nozzles causing the strip lights to waver slightly.
The canopy was up and the ladder was pulled up to the cockpit. For the fifth time in a half hour Djaliz climbed to the top of the ladder and peered in at the pilot’s status console, goosing the computer through its fifth checklist. The liquid crystal display recited the aircraft’s latest statistics, flashing graphics and charts and temperature profiles, oil pressures, hydraulic system status. All of it within limits.
Djaliz lowered himself back down to the ground and reexamined the electronic warfare pod slung under the pointed nose of the large jet, the one he’d filled with supercold liquid helium. The ungainly size of the pod marred the sleek streamlined beauty of the aircraft. The pod was new with the latest modification of the Firestar, this particular pod nearly fresh out of the crate from Osaka. Djaliz worried over it for a moment and climbed the ladder again and this time climbed all the way into the cockpit, putting the pilot’s flight helmet aside on the engine control console. He dialed up the menu for the electronic warfare pod and ordered a self-check.