Taha struggled to get to his feet, and groped his way blindly from the opening and away from the campfire. His herd was suffering the same fate.
Many of them had already fallen. Others bleated in agony. Taha’s eyes burned and his vision blurred. He rubbed his nose with his hand and it was covered with blood.
He felt nauseated, weak, and disoriented. Suddenly he was finding it difficult to continue standing.
Through it all, the light continued to follow him. The thumping sound made by the beast grew louder and his head was pounding. Finally, when Taha could stand it no longer, he sagged to his knees and his body pitched forward into the damp pasture grass. He was bleeding from his nose, his mouth, and his ears.
Unable to breathe, he clutched at his chest and began screaming, but the gesture was futile.
Whatever agony and tribulations Taha Hayawi may have felt in those final moments, they were never recorded. As it had for his flock and his dogs, the paroxysm of dying came too quickly.
* The three-man crew of the Russian-built Kamov Hormone watched the scene below them with an arrogant dispassion. The commander of the aircraft, a hungry-looking man with hollow eyes and close-cropped beard, requested an update after the third pass.
“There are no signs of movement,” his engineer reported.
“This formula appears to be as effective as Dr. Rashid anticipated.”
A third man, with a clipboard balanced on his knee, checked his watch and confirmed the assessment of his fellow crewman.
“From the time the canisters were ejected until we were unable to detect any movement in the target area — less than seven minutes.” Then he added, “It would appear that it is as effective as the previous versions.”
Tobias Carrington Bogner sorted through the week’s accumulation of mail and quickly determined the Postal Service had done little to enrich his life. There was the predictable handful of flyers and junk mail, a telephone bill, and an invitation to attend one of the round of the upcoming holiday season’s cocktail parties. The sender had misspelled his name, but it was the only discernible reward for having spent the better part of a rainy, disappointing week in Honolulu. Looking back, Bogner realized the Navy’s annual SOA security conference had been a wash; there was little in the way of new information and the principal speaker had been called away at the last minute. The upside was that the conference had been held in Hawaii. But the four days that followed had been dotted with frequent rain showers and more than their share of cloudy weather. Bogner had made a halfhearted attempt to contact two old Navy acquaintances, both preflight buddies from his days in Pensacola. But one of them. Bill Langhor, was himself on vacation, and Bert Keller’s mother complained she hadn’t heard from her son in weeks. At age forty-five, Keller’s mother lamented, her son was still chasing the perfect wave. So much for reunions.
T. C. “Toby” Bogner, on the cusp of his forty-sixth birthday, still retained his rank of captain in the United States Navy, and according to the Navy, was still on active duty. But he had been attached to the Washington bureau of the Internal Security Agency for the past eleven years. His flying days for the Navy, a passion when he was younger, were over. The same could be said for his marriage.
Toby Bogner had married Joyce Ellen Baker two days after an Act of Congress had ordained him an officer and a gentleman. He was commissioned, married, and assigned to flight school at Pensacola — all in the space of seventy-two hours.
At the time he was twenty-two. Joy was twenty-one. He had a degree in engineering from Cal Tech. She was a late-starting junior at Pasadena City College. As one of his buddies had phrased it at the time, they looked like Ken and Barby. That was the problem — in the end they only looked like Ken and Barby.
Fifteen years later, a Los Angeles County judge resolved their differences for them, a divorce was granted, and Joy was given custody of the only tangible result of their union, a daughter, Kim.
Joy’s complaint was that Bogner was always off on a mission of some kind. Put more succinctly, the Navy was his life. If Bogner had a criticism of Joy, it was the demands of her own career. Joy had finished college, was hired by a local TV station, and in the short span of two years became a hot property at CBS News. The social demands were excessive, the hours worse — and Bogner was never around when she needed him. To Bogner, “needing him” meant escorting her to one of the network’s official functions or being there to assuage her fears and misgivings.
The flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles and the subsequent flight to Washington had left Bogner with a serious case of traveler’s fatigue, and now he was looking forward to nothing more than a hot shower and a good night’s sleep. He shared the second-story, two-bedroom condo with an old friend, Reese Wayne. Wayne was a freelance writer who spent most of his time in Europe. The two men were seldom in town at the same time and the arrangement worked well for both of them. Consequently, when the phone rang on his way into the shower, the chances were less than fifty-fifty that the call was for him. The chances became even slimmer when he stopped to consider only three people had his phone number: Clancy Packer, Joy, and Kim. Since Clancy made it a habit of turning in at an early hour, and he had talked to his daughter earlier in the day from the airport in Los Angeles, it was unlikely to be either of them. Joy, on the other hand, was a distinct possibility; she had a habit of calling when he least expected it.
He dropped the towel and managed to pluck the phone up before the answering machine took over.
“Bogner here,” he snapped. It was more of a threat than a greeting.
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to talk with your mouth full?” Joy said. Her voice was as seductive as ever. It was that voice, Bogner was convinced, that enabled his ex-wife to pull down an attractive six-figure salary and get so many interviews with people who professed to have an aversion to the media.
“I’m eating a breakfast bar,” Bogner admitted.
“Breakfast bar? It’s almost ten-thirty, Tobias.
Don’t you have anything else in the house?”
Bogner considered reading her the list of ingredients.
“It says here that it meets all the minimum daily requirements,” he said.
“Besides, I’ve been out of town and you know Reese. His idea of leaving the refrigerator stocked is a six-pack of Budweiser.”
“Bachelors…” Joy muttered. He knew she had every hope he would pick up on the derisive tone in her voice.
“What’s on your mind. Joy? And don’t tell me you called to discuss my eating habits.”
“You’re such a cynic. The truth is I was thinking about you and decided to call and see how you were feeling. That’s all.” As usual, his ex-wife had caught him off guard. First the call and now the fact that the caustic edge in her voice had disappeared.
Bogner laughed.
“Okay, I believe you. Now what’s really on your mind?”
“Well, I thought perhaps you might like to buy me a drink? What better on a cold, rainy, winter night in Washington?”
As tired as he was, Bogner actually considered the invitation for a moment.
“Sorry. I’m beat. I just spent the better part of the last twenty-four hours on a plane. How about a rain check?”
There was a pause before Joy continued.
“All right then, stripped of my womanly wiles, I guess I’ll have to be up front about it. One of the newsmen just dropped an item on my desk and I thought you might know something about it.”