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William could not hear the soldiers. Had they turned right instead of left?

Fouad straightened and removed the pen-sized laser from his pocket. ‘Tell them.’

‘Jane, get us an OWL.’

‘—on its way—’ Jane said.

‘OWL descending,’ Dalrymple said.

Then he heard Periglas. ‘This one’s going to take out some buildings. Channeled blast. Get the hell out of there.—brick walls—’

‘I will stay and make sure,’ Fouad said to William.

‘Periglas says we need to get away from these buildings. They’ve got it pinpointed.’

‘Do they have it targeted precisely? Can we be sure? I don’t think we can take that risk.’

Soldiers walked cautiously around the curve, gun barrels foremost. That was it. No escape. Plan B with a vengeance. Without hesitation, William brought up his pistol and fired as he had been trained—as Pete Farrow had trained him, without thought. Two men fell back like broken dolls, then more shouting, more bursts tearing up the bricks and stone. Clouds of stone dust drifted down.

The Israelis on the Volvo truck hunkered and returned fire with their own machine pistols. William and Fouad were pinned. They could not escape in either direction. Fouad aimed his shots toward the truck. One of the Israelis screamed.
William positioned himself to respond to the soldiers. ‘I’ll keep these guys busy.’

Fouad smiled and brushed William’s face with his hand, then shined the laser on the back of the hedgehog, creating a brilliant fan of sparkling red.

No time to think. The wisdom of the chambered round. They were all dead anyway.

A young Israeli lying in the back of the truck raised the white control box. Fouad tried to kill him but missed.

Gray smoke poured from the bottom of the hedgehog launcher. They heard an echoing, staccato hiss.

Just one truck would be enough. Millions of pilgrims, spreading around the world, clothes reeking with bad yeast. Goodbye memory. Goodbye history.

William looked skyward as his ears popped. The cloudless blue sky between the apartment buildings shimmered. Was there a white line up there…? Like a contrail, an invisible finger writing in brilliant cloud, descending.

Fouad shouted, ‘
Allahu Ak
—’

The ground spasmed in rage.

William did not hear the rest.

Rebecca helped Grange into a small van commandeered by the Jannies. They had waited in the deserted shop, squatting behind the counter, until Salil, Fouad’s second in command, leader of the group that had first entered Mina, returned and gestured for them to come out. The air was hot and still and full of the smell of burning. Three columns of dense swirling black and white smoke rose high over the town and the tent city, but nothing—not the fighting, not the extraordinary pinpoint explosions and volcano-like fires, had stopped the pilgrimage from reaching its inevitable conclusion. From the main road heading west to Mecca, they could see white-clad Hajjis by the tens of thousands streaming into the split levels of pedestrian access to the three stone pillars,
Jamarat-al-Aqaba, Jamarat-al-Wusta
, and
Jamarat-al-Ula.

Rebecca hunkered in the back of the van, crammed beside Grange and ten of the Jannies. There was little to say. Nobody knew the fate of the rest of their fellows, including William and Fouad. Jane and Dalrymple had nothing to report, except that the impact of the third and last OWL had collapsed a section of apartments and shops surrounding the alley. Damage assessment was still being completed, but the judgment of the experts on the
Heinlein
and back in Washington was that all three trucks had been destroyed as planned, punched into fifty-foot holes in the earth and then completely incinerated, and their cargo with them.

Midges capable of retrieval by high altitude UAVs were collecting dust from the air above Mina and from the plumes of smoke to return samples for later analysis.

Salil, driving the van, found the back road through the dry rocky hills to the desert waste. The drive became hot, dusty, and bumpy. Rebecca did not care. She was deep in thought, wondering what more she could have done.

She had lost her students. Sacrificed them. And she did not know for what. Their mission had been accomplished, but she felt no sense of pride for a job well done. All she felt was that deep anger that had propelled her for too many years; the unreasoning, innocent outrage that so many could behave without restraint, with no sense of balance or honor, much less of law, and demand so much of the desperate few tasked to rein them in.

William.

Fouad.

Jane spoke in her ear. ‘I swear, Rebecca, I’m staying here until the last midge falls from the sky.’

‘Do you see them?’ Rebecca asked.

‘I do not. Nothing.’

‘You stay there and keep watch. You do that,’ Rebecca said. The others with working earnodes pointedly did not appear to be listening, but their faces were stiff and pale with fatigue and that deadly sense of let-down, of reassessment and shapeless grief that follows combat and killing.

Rebecca wasn’t at all sure the world deserved her children.

Arafat is the Hajj
. So Muhammad had proclaimed.

The final OWL’s cataclysm had split the ground beneath their boots and dropped them twenty feet to the dank, dry bottom of a concrete pipe. Brick dust and chunks of concrete had filled the crack above and much of the pipe to either side, leaving only a man-sized gap to the southeast. They had squeezed through the gap and now walked down the slope of the pipe, part of the drainage system that kept these dry valleys from flash-flooding during infrequent rains; a long and straight course through Mina with no openings other than drains too small to squeeze through and manhole covers welded shut by the Saudis before the invasion, to prevent just such excursions as Fouad and William were now attempting.

William held his arm close to his breast. It was broken, that much he knew. He was covered with painful burns and one eye was obscured by proud flesh. He hurt all over but he still looked better than Fouad, the side of whose face was thickly crusted with blood.

They stooped and followed the pipe for long kilometers until both emerged in a culvert that spread a concrete fan into a small wadi debouching into Aramah Valley. From there, they climbed up to a pedestrian road, now almost empty, and removed their uniforms, assuming cast-off robes. Fouad said nothing as they walked, weaponless and naked under the towels of
ihram,
carrying only their forged credentials, to Mount Rahmat, the Mount of Mercy.

William was too dazed and exhausted to wonder what they were up to.

They stood at Arafat for several hours, not the sunrise to sunset required for a true Hajj. Fouad then started walking again, and William followed. They were met by soldiers in a truck, roaring along the pedestrian road and apparently tracking down stray pilgrims to rob them or be bribed to take them through the confusion, back to Mina or even to Mecca, if they had sufficient money.

Fouad convinced them they had been injured by brigands, and the soldiers, impressed by their injuries and solemnity, finally felt some sense of guilt after the orgy of confusion and desecration. They let them be and drove off.

The walk back to Mina took the rest of the day and at nightfall, they stood among the thousands of pilgrims still trying to complete their Hajj, on the top level of the Jamarat Overpass, having both picked up forty-nine pebbles from the scattered little mounds along the road from Muzdalifah.

William was simply following Fouad’s example, like an automaton—doing what he thought might be necessary to pass, to survive. For the most part, Fouad behaved as if William did not exist.

With a pained expression, Fouad pushed through the thinning crowds, many of them parting in awe or disgust at the sight of such injuries, such martyrs, and they both threw their pebbles at the pillars, one after the other, walking on stiff legs and staring with dead eyes, like ghosts.

Many things had been thrown at the pillars, piling up in enormous mounds at the bases of each, and not just pebbles: shoes, coins, articles of clothing, and weapons—surprisingly expensive weapons. Perhaps some of the soldiers and brigands had repented as they watched pilgrims die.

Then they moved on to Mecca, another long walk. William did not think they would make it, but they found dropped
bottles of water along the way, and more bodies, and Fouad was relentless.

Only as they came within site of the minarets of the Masjid al-Haram did Fouad speak. ‘I am done with this,’ he said, stalking backwards ahead of William. ‘It is over. I am my father’s son no more. This is not Hajj, and I can never return for the shame. Who am I now? Does anyone know?
What have they done? What have they done?
’

He spoke these last words in a harsh growl, his swollen face a monster’s mask of pain. Tears mixed with blood on his cracked cheeks.

William had no answer.

On the road, a Red Crescent ambulance found them and soon they were surrounded by solicitous doctors and two nurses wrapped head to toe in gray chalabis.

They rode in the back of the ambulance to Mecca, passing trucks filled with soldiers and more bodies pushed to the sides of the road.

Many more bodies.

But the lights of the Grand Mosque burned bright, and they were told that even now, Hajjis were circling the
Kaabah
, the House of God, rejoicing in their fortune. For they had been to Mecca and listened to God, and soon they would be going home.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper
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FIRST EDITION

First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins
Publishers
2005

Copyright © Greg Bear 2005

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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