40 Chapter 33

Just an hour ago in an old Qatari village Captain Lennox eyed his men: a team of three, and the stragglers they had picked up in the course of their retreat from the devastated base. Had their footsteps been enough to cause the old sign to collapse like that? He was pondering other possibilities when the sand beneath Donnely began to vibrate.

Something gleaming, metallic, and snake-like slithered out beneath him. Exhibiting reflexes fast enough to bring tears to the eyes of the most demanding drill sergeant, the Irish-American sergeant whipped his gun downward and fired off a concentrated burst. Sand erupted in all directions, and the thing disappeared. Gone? Lennox wondered.

His question was answered an instant later as Skorponok exploded from the dry ground. Sand flew in all directions as the barbed metal tail curled around the startled Donnely's lower legs and yanked him off his feet. Flipping the soldier upside down in midair, it grabbed him anew and vanished back beneath the surface. The young sergeant hadn't had time enough to scream.

Lennox did. "Move move move!" He and the remaining members of the squad broke into a mad sprint toward the village. They gained a moment or two before the metal scorpion shape erupted from the ground behind them a second time. Inside the village boundary dogs appeared, barking like mad. Horses and camels reared and bolted in all directions, adding to the confusion. Rounding a mudbrick wall, Lennox howled at his men.

"You two, cover the road! Epps, take point! Fig, you're eyes in the back! Everyone, watch the ground! Try to stay off the sand and on the rock!" Soldiers took up defensive positions behind the mud walls. Appearing out of nowhere, an older man ran toward them. Probably Yemeni, or maybe Somali, Lennox thought absently as he took the measure of the newcomer. Espying Mahfouz, the man swerved in the youth's direction. Their attention on other matters, Lennox and his colleagues ignored the reunion of father and son.

"Where have you been?" the man inquired anxiously in Arabic. "At the base. It's gone, Papa. All gone! Something destroyed it, in spite of the Americans' weapons. It was killing everybody, blowing everything up. Not terrorists, I think. Something different, like out of Hell." Turning, he pointed toward where Lennox crouched behind an ancient whitewashed wall. "I didn't know what to do or where to go. These men saved my life, Papa!"

The bearded elder glanced over at the American captain. "Better you had stayed away from them and kept your nose in the Book!" Despite his terror, Mahfouz was indignant. "I attend to my studies! Ask the mufti. And I do my chores. After that, my time is my own. And there is nothing in the Qur'an against taking chocolate from visitors." Listening to the familial byplay had stimulated Lennox's farfrom-fluent but moderately competent Arabic. Glancing occasionally at the deceptively quiet ground on the other side of the wall, he looked back and yelled as politely as he could, "Sir! In the name of the Prophet, praise be unto him— do you have a phone? "

At that moment Skorponok exploded from the sand almost directly in front of the wall.

"Lay down fire!" Lennox yelled as he followed a beckoning father and son toward one unremarkable whitewashed building among many. Each soldier promptly let loose with whatever armament he happened to be carrying. The metal arachnoid shape responded with bursts of whitehot plasma that erupted against walls, sand, and the buildings behind, vaporizing everything with which they came into contact.

The interior of the old building had been competently fixed up and decorated with a raft of salvaged and scav-enged materials. As befitted the detritus of a society suddenly become wealthy beyond imagining, some of the castoffs were practically brandnew. Such was the case with the cell phone that the father grabbed from a desk and passed to the frantic American officer. It was a standard commercial phone, and he dialed rapidly. When the international operator answered, Lennox had to shout to make himself heard over the staccato reverberations of the gunfire and explosions outside.

"A T and T," the voice declared in heavily accented subcontinental English, "how may I direct your call?"

"International to the United States," Lennox yelled. "This is an emergency Pentagon call, class A!" "Your cell service does not include long-distance minutes, sir. Do you have a major credit card?" Lennox had to force himself not to crush the slim phone in his fist. "Listen carefully to me: I need you to put me through now."

"I will be most happy to connect you, sir. Preferably without the yelling, and with a major credit card." Uttering an oath sufficiently universal in tone and that both accommodating father and son could easily understand the gist of it, Lennox whirled and raced back outside.

The prospect from the exterior of the house was not good. Bullets merely deflected off the scorpion-thing's metal hide. As Lennox dove for cover, Figueroa took aim with a grenade launcher and let loose. Sand and gravel flew in all directions.

More accustomed to handling paperwork than RPGs, the warrant officer bawled in frustration. "I hit it—I hit the son of a bitch, but the freak thing won't go down!" As Figueroa stood staring in disbelief at the rapidly recovering monster, Lennox sprinted up to him and spun him around. One desperate stare met another.

"I need a credit card!" "Wha?" Figueroa blanked for a moment, then shook his head apologetically. "My wife cut 'em up, Cap. I thought I came out ahead on that one." Crap! Leaving the warrant officer to reload in his wake, Lennox looked around wildly until he spotted Epps. Heedless of his own safety, the tech sergeant was still on point, firing furiously at an agile, dodging target that refused to succumb to the blazing crossfire.

"Come on, sucker!" Epps was screaming at the top of his lungs and blasting away madly as Lennox slid to a stop alongside him. "Tear your metal ass up!" From the open cell phone held in a death grip in Lennox's left hand, a voice exclaimed rather sternly. "Sir, I appreciate that you are having some kind of difficulty, but there is no need for that kind of language."

"No, not you, not you!" the captain howled at the phone. "Hang on." Grabbing Epps by the shoulder, he turned him around to face him. "Your wallet! I need your wallet!" To his credit, Epps barely blinked. "Back pocket!"

Yanking out the battered wallet, Lennox rolled to one side as balls of plasma hissed past overhead. "Hello!" he yelled at the phone. A waterfall of static crackled back at him. "Oh no. Do you hear me now?"

While waiting for a response he fumbled through the surprisingly large packet of cards contained in the wallet, studiously ignoring the ones featuring nude women on the reasonable as-sumption that they had been issued by institutions other than major international banking concerns.

"Got it," he wheezed gratefully as a basic Visa fell into his hand. As fast and clearly as he could, he rattled off the numbers into the phone. "And don't tell me you don't take it."

"Of course we take it, sir." The operator's tone was calm and reassuring. "Would you like to hear about our Premium Plus World Service Package? Five hundred award points gets you a free shiatsu massage at the participating hotel of your choice—and from your continuing tone may I say that it is my personal opinion that you could definitely benefit from this special limited-time offer."

"Put the damn call through now!" He passed the phone to Epps. "Here! Pentagon!" As Epps swapped his weapon for the phone, Lennox set himself up and began unloading clip after clip in the direction of the relentless mechanical monstrosity.

It was equally frantic but considerably less noisy in the Washington, D.C., exchange room. With advanced communications down, multiple lines manned by studious, well-trained operators were busily being manually routed across the country and to every continent. One operator barely had time to murmur "Pentagon Emergency Line" when a frenzied voice on the other end howled "United States Air Force officer and team under hostile unidentified fire in Qatar, east of recently attacked SOCCENT base, relay position to National Military Command!"

As earth and stone erupted around him, Epps tried to shield the phone's pickup from as much of the destructive din as possible. Ominously, less and less of the clamor was coming from nearby as one soldier after another was taken out by a weapon the likes of which the tech sergeant had never encountered. Containing his fury, he concentrated on making himself understood over their only lifeline to the outside world. "Troops in contact mission, unknown freakin' aggres-sor! Need gunships on station ASAP, everything you can send this way." A readout on the phone's miniature screen drew his attention. "And I got a low battery!"

When the mud wall they had been shielding behind was disintegrated by successive bursts of plasma, both Epps and Lennox had to beat a hurried retreat in search of fresh cover. With buildings collapsing or being blown to bits all around him, the tech sergeant somehow managed to keep the cell phone in the vicinity of his mouth. It was hard enough to hang on to it, much less keep talking as he ran and dodged. "Roger—hello? Hello? Oh no —do you hear me now—hear me now? Shit, hear me now? " Once again something intelligible crackled from the speaker.

"I got you, I got you . . ." Plasma touched down and blew a crater in the ground just to his right. Instead of sprinting in the opposite direction he held his ground. Move again and he might lose the signal for good.

"Roger that," he barked into the phone. "Seven-man team north of orange smoke, plenty of dust and fire signals." Another chunk of barren soil vaporized off to his left, and he flinched. "Whoa, almost lost my head! Attack directions west, you're cleared hot." His gaze shifted toward the cloudless, burning blue Arabian sky. "This will be danger close, but we got no choice. We're getting sliced and diced here!" The reply made him smile. Seeing the captain glancing in his direction, Epps shot him a thumbs-up and raised what was left of his increasingly hoarse voice. "GOT A BEAM-RIDER INCOMING! LAZE TARGET!"

As the word was passed around, the surviving soldiers fanned out, all trying to aim their laser designators at their attacker from different directions. The more options they gave the approaching aircraft, the more precise the strike would be. Which, considering their own inescapable proximity to the intended target, was a concern very much on everyone's mind. The red beams that crisscrossed the scorpion-thing were instantly picked up by the designators in the cockpits of the two low-flying A-10s. In the lead fighter, the pilot acknowledged them gratefully. It was always useful when someone else marked the objective for you. "Warthog One to base, we've acquired target."

All of the firing and killing Skorponok had unleashed had been in search of a single device. The deaths of so many resident organics were incidental and of no consequence. The Decepticon regretted only the amount of time and effort it was being forced to expend. The humans were determined fighters, but the negligible weapons they carried constituted little more than an irritating inconvenience. Finally locating the apparatus for which it had been searching, the mechanoid took careful aim and fired afresh. The human holding the desired device went down, and the instrument spilled from his pack. Gratified, the Decepticon started toward the place where it lay unprotected on the sand. It was time to terminate the farce and move on to matters of considerably more significance.

"Hogs One and Two," the pilot of the lead fighter declared systematically, "locking on."

As the first to see the incoming missiles, Lennox had just enough time to yelp, "The heat's coming!" as he dove over a low embankment fronting a shallow gully and tried to bury himself in the sand deeper than the deadest pharaoh. Outraged earth erupted behind him as missiles from the Warthogs hit home. With the last clods and bits of sand and soil still raining down around him, he raised his head for a look. The missiles had dug an impressive hole in the center of the village. But to his horror and disbelief, a by-now-all-too-familiar mechanical shape was angrily clawing its way out of the cavity.

"No way." It was as much a curse as an expression of disbelief. Scanning the ravaged surroundings, he spotted the tech sergeant pressed up against a still-standing building and shouted in his direction, "Still not down, Epps!" Staring back at his superior, Epps nodded his understanding and yelled into the phone. His message was relayed halfway around the world and almost instantly back again.

"Spooky, thirty-two: use oneoh-five shells. Bring the rain!" A droning roar made him look up. Lennox did like-wise, as did every one of those still able to do so.

"Oh crap," Lennox murmured —but not unhappily. Rising, he ran like hell. Not for cover, but away from the location of the scorpion-thing. Anywhere away from the scorpion-thing. Lumbering through the superheated air, the AC-130 gunship unleashed a six-thousand-round-a-minute storm of sabot rounds at the metallic shape clearly visible on the ground below. Sand vaporized, rock disintegrated. A miniature artificial sandstorm engulfed the fleeing soldiers. On the screens at the Pentagon the attack played back like outtakes from a bad movie. Like everyone else, an anxious Keller was mesmerized by the white-hot thermal signature that had overwhelmed the view from the circling reconnaissance drone.

"What happened? Did we lose them?" Still standing alongside the secretary, the staff sergeant who had brought the initial news once more addressed his headset pickup. "Warthog One and Two: do you have a visual on the soldiers? Over. Report on survivors, over."

In the absence of wind, it took a moment for the dust to settle. When it had cleared enough to see again, Epps peered around the building behind which he had taken shelter. Something was moving in the center of the hell that had been unleashed by the gunship. Their mechanical nemesis, still standing. But . . . It was stumbling around, clearly in distress. As he looked on, the tip of its metal tail fell off, seared from the rest of the body. Dipping its head, it dropped back into the sand and—disappeared.

"Man," he muttered to himself as he cautiously stepped away from the building that had protected him, "that is one freaky machine."

There was a rumble as one of the A-10s did a flyby directly overhead. Closer, another shape materialized out of the smoke: Captain Lennox. Officer and noncom exchanged exhausted, somber grins. Soaring past, the Warthog's pilot returned his gaze forward. "Copy, base. We got 'em. Swinging around to do a count." The slow-flying antitank fighter banked sharply as its pilot brought it around for another look. Completely winded, Lennox sank to his knees. Around them villagers began to emerge from hiding. Officer and noncom were inordinately relieved to see that Mahfouz and his father were among them.

As the confirmation of their survival washed over them, John Keller's shoulders sagged with a mixture of relief and exhaustion. His gaze turned towards General Bingham, a silent question hanging in the air.

"So, do you believe me now?" John asked, his voice tinged with a hint of weariness. "That the virus was more alien than human?"

Bingham's gaze remained fixed on the screen, the weight of the recent events sinking in. After a moment of contemplative silence, he finally nodded, a tacit acknowledgment of the truth that had been laid bare before them.

John approached Maggie with a sense of urgency, his footsteps purposeful as he handed her a small memory card.

"This has the data on the virus," he explained quickly, his tone urgent. "I need you to take it to Alex and get a reading on it immediately."

Maggie nodded in understanding, her expression focused as she tucked the memory card safely into her compact makeup kit. With a determined nod, she turned on her heel and swiftly exited the room.