Kismet held on a moment longer, fearful that his foe was feigning collapse, but the foul odor of his bowels releasing signaled that the battle had indeed been to the death. For a moment, measured by the thudding of his heart in his chest and a syncopated throb of pain behind his eyeballs, he could only lie motionless on the steel deck. His memory returned in crashing waves — his tormentor was dead… Chiron was wounded… The bomb was….
“The bomb!” The words broke from his bruised larynx as he heaved Saeed’s unmoving form away and scrambled to his feet. The turret, though only a few steps away, felt like the last mile of a marathon. His feet seemed mired in quicksand as he struggled up the stairs. The device, for all its potential destructiveness, gave no indication of imminent peril; it might as well have been a discarded refrigerator. The only thing that had changed since last he looked was the digital readout on the timer, and when his eyes finally focused on the black and gray liquid crystal display, his triumph over Saeed wilted.
0:05… 0:04…0:03…0:02….
“No.”
0:01… 0:00.
Nineteen
In the sixty years since their development, atomic weapons had only been used twice against living targets: the occupants of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, Japan. For maximum effectiveness, those bombs, thirteen and twenty kilotons respectively, had each been detonated approximately 500 meters above the ground. Five hundred meters, nearly a quarter of a mile, was the closest anyone had even been to the uncontrollable storm of energy released by the fission of an atom.
Although explosive yield — as reckoned in metric tons of TNT — was the yardstick by which bombs were measured, all the dynamite in the world could not duplicate the effects of even a low-yield nuclear weapon. An atom bomb did not simply release heat and kinetic energy, the forces that wreak devastation upon their intended victims. Rather, when the nuclear core reached critical mass, it became a small-scale quasi-stellar object — a miniature star on earth, which annihilated its entire mass in a single instant. The blinding flash of light, which to a distant observer seemed to precede the shock wave and firestorm by a few seconds, was in fact a burst of electromagnetic energy across the entire spectrum — X-rays, gamma rays, and light visible and invisible in a storm of photons dense enough at close range to etch shadows into stone.
It was an enduring indictment of the short sightedness of human intellect that none of the scientists involved in creating and refining the so-called “doomsday weapons” considered for an instant that the creation of a tiny temporal quasar might have a sympathetic effect, not simply on the planet, but on the cosmos itself. Realistically however, no one could possibly have known what sort of phenomena might occur at the event horizon; no one had ever been that close. Yet, the Theory of Special Relativity which had enabled those scientists to unleash the destructive power of the atom — expressed in the simple equation E=mc2—ought to have enlightened them to the other effects of bringing new energy into the universe.
Any physical object accelerating toward the speed of light experienced what Einstein described as “time-dilation;” a variation in the perception of the passage of time depending on the velocity of the observer. It should have been obvious to them that in nuclear weapons, as in stars, at the event horizon where matter gives birth to energy, time has virtually no meaning.
Kismet stared at the row of zeroes for a long time before it occurred to him that perhaps something more ought to have happened. Had the bomb malfunctioned somehow? The wind had died away to nothing and the foreboding silence offered no answers.
He glanced down at Chiron. Even from several meters away, he could see that the gunshot wound was dire. A bubble of bright scarlet had risen from the center of his chest and seemed poised to erupt. Odd that it hasn’t, he thought, morbidly. It was an arterial bleed and ought to have been spurting like a fountain so long as the old man’s heart continued to pump. The explanation was brutally obvious: Chiron was already dead.
Except somehow that didn’t quite seem like the right answer. His gaze shifted to the other body occupying the platform: Colonel Saeed Tariq Al-Sharaf. He did not feel the same sort of doubt regarding the fate of his old nemesis. Death hovered over the Iraqi torturer like a black aura, sucking the last vestiges of his life force into the still night. The image was so vivid that Kismet looked away, fearful that the grinning skull beneath the shadowy cowl might next turn its gaze upon him.
0:00
It was only then that he realized he had not turned his head at all. His gaze had never left the unblinking display of the countdown timer. Then how…?
His attention was drawn upward, to where the television aerial speared the sky, and what he saw there staggered belief.
His first thought was that he was hallucinating. In fact, he could not be literally seeing the gyrating column of energy that spiraled into the heavens for the simple reason that he was under the cover of the turret. For that matter, his eyes were still locked on the unchanging numeric display of the bomb. It was that impossibility, however, which convinced him of the accuracy of his observations and further verified his growing suspicion that he was no longer completely in the physical world. He also realized in that instant that the nuclear device had not malfunctioned; it had detonated right on schedule.
The gyre stabbed out of the upper atmosphere and into the tower like a tornado of light. It was magnetic energy, he realized, invisible to the naked eye, but easily discernible in this frozen moment. There was no mistaking the direction of the current. The lines of force undulated down into the tower exactly as Chiron had described in his writings. And somewhere high above, something was moving in the tempest, struggling against its tether as the flames of imminent destruction licked at its back.
Oh, God. It’s all true. And I failed.
The Eiffel Tower had still been polarized at the moment of detonation. Maybe the engineers had missed their deadline, or maybe Kismet’s grasp of how to manipulate the geo- and electromagnetic energies had been found wanting. Whatever the reason, the end result was the same. The electromagnetic pulse from the bomb would feed back into the planetary web, just as Chiron planned, and destroy it and any sort of sentient being that dwelled therein. It was only a matter of time. It was already too late.
0:00
Rage consumed him for a long time, rage at Chiron for having conceived of such a diabolical scheme, at himself for having failed to notice the subtle signs pointing to the coming apocalypse, and even at God for not doing something more on His own behalf. Inevitably, the anger gave way to despair. Much later, when he had wrung the last drops of self-pity from his psyche, he began looking for a better answer.
He reached for the bomb, thinking that if he could carry out his original plan to remove the plutonium core, he might somehow undo the moment in which he now found himself a prisoner. Nothing happened. His physical body was completely unresponsive to the commands of his mind, or rather, the electro-chemical impulse that would instruct his limbs to move had not yet happened. Movement required time, and time was something Kismet no longer had. The only thing that could save him now was a miracle.
He once more fixed the churning heavens in his mind’s eye. Miracle. I guess that would be your department.
But if the entity in the swirling mass of energy heard his implicit request — or if it even existed at all — it gave no indication. Nothing happened, nothing at all. The clock still read zero and time remained at a standstill.