The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) (61 page)

Silence.

“it’s over?”

“Impossible,” mumbled the driver.

“But there’s no noise … no wind,” said Joe.

“No sand,” said Rizzo.

Tom heard the conversation, and while he realized that the fury of the storm had subsided, his eyes weren’t on the others in the car. Instead he was looking in the back of the car past Annie’s head. Blackened spots seeped through the gun bag that held Aaron’s staff, and the plastic storage bin alongside the bag was melting along its length.

“Impossible,” repeated the driver. “These storms last for hours.”

Tom withdrew his shirt from Annie’s head and nodded toward the back of the car. “Maybe not. C’mon, Annie, let’s get out and take a look around.”

Kalil Unifa knelt in the lee of his car, his jacket wrapped tightly around his head. Varun pressed as tightly into the metal as his leader.

“We can see nothing, Kalil,” Varun shouted near his ear. “Bring the men in.”

The jacket was poor protection. Unifa had a mouthful of sand particles, his ears were stopped up, and visibility was long gone. “No, find the goggles. We must keep looking.”

Sand fell onto his head as he pushed open the back door of the Rover, but it was the deposit of the storm, not its presence. Bohannon leaned his shoulders out the door and looked up, between a break in the tent. The sky above was blue and bright. He looked forward, past the front Rover. Twenty feet beyond where the Rovers were parked, the sandstorm raged. Tom ducked back into the vehicle, looking first at Annie, then at the weapons bag in the back. “You’re not going to believe this.”

They stood between the two vehicles, their heads craned backward, looking in all directions. Surrounding them, on all sides, was a roiling wall of wind-blown brown grit. But where they stood was quiet, peaceful, separate.

Tom held the gun bag by its strap, dangling it in front of him, afraid to touch it lest—what?

Rizzo came up to Tom’s side. “Hey, why don’t you check out the stick, Tom?”

Looking down, Tom held the gun bag out toward Rizzo. “Curious? Here.”

“Yo. I’m already short. I don’t need to be deaf and dumb, too. You touch it.”

The idea came unbidden, but clear as the sky above them. Tom looked at the bag, took a breath.
God, help me.
Then he started walking away from the Rovers, toward the storm. With each step he took, the storm got no closer. Ten, twelve, fourteen steps and still the wildly whipping waves of sand remained as far in front of him as they had when he started.

Annie was at his side.

“Tom!”

“I know.” He turned to the others, open-mouthed between the Land Rovers. “Come on. Let’s get moving while we can. I have no idea how long this might last.”

Bohannon’s Land Rover was now in the lead, Kabir’s close behind, almost knit to the back bumper. And the calm in the midst of the storm traveled with them. It was like driving in a tunnel. Even the sky above them was obliterated by the roaring storm. But down here, as they exited the wadi and swung west following the compass, around the edges of Abraham’s Oasis toward Al Asad, a miraculous calm enveloped both the cars and the people in them. And the faster they drove, the faster the storm opened in front of them.

The driver demanded Bohannon sit in the back of the vehicle, not next to him. “Don’t point that thing anywhere near me.”

But as they raced across the desert flats toward the air base, Rizzo on one side, Annie on the other, Rodriguez draped over the back of the front seat, Bohannon held the gun bag gingerly in his lap. He looked up at his wife. “What do you think?”

“I’m dying to see what’s inside,” said Annie.

Rizzo bent over and peeked around Tom, his eyes wide. “How soon do you want to get your wish?”

“Sammy, if the staff was a danger to us, we all would be dead by now,” she responded. “Go ahead, Tom. Open it. We’ve got to know.”

The old Subaru’s engine cranked in paroxysms of grinding protest, as if ripping itself apart from the inside. Kalil Unifa coughed violently and punched the steering wheel. Even if he knew where to go, even if he knew where the rest of his men were at this moment, he wasn’t going anywhere. Building in intensity, the wind buffeted the car even more viciously, and new, thicker clouds of sand streamed in through unprotected openings, replacing more and more of the vanishing oxygen.

Kalil called out to Allah, cursed his luck, coughed up blood, and dreaded his next breath.

Images from the Bible dashed through Bohannon’s mind as he inched open the zipper on the weapons bag. What would he find inside? A budding almond tree? A slithering snake?
I hate snakes!

As he pulled back the flap of the bag, Bohannon tried to prepare for almost anything. Except this.

It was still a stick. Dead. Petrified like a stone.

“Doesn’t look very powerful, does it?” Rizzo leaned a hand toward the shaft, then stopped. “Well, maybe I’ll let you handle Moses’s missile launcher … just in case.”

“There’s the air base,” said Joe.

Bohannon looked up as the perimeter fence of Al Asad emerged from the blowing brown of the sandstorm. As they came closer to the fence, the area clear of the sandstorm now extended before them in an ever-lengthening avenue of early evening sunshine and blue sky.

“Over there,” Bohannon pointed over the driver’s shoulder. “It’s a gate.”

He felt the heat just as Rizzo opened his mouth. “How are we …”

The jolt of heat raced through Bohannon’s right hand and up his arm just as the two halves of the cyclone fence gate blasted inward, off their hinges. The Land Rovers continued moving at high speed toward the long strip of concrete that opened before them. The sandstorm was still raging, but now it was raging on either side of this long runway. The rest of the base, even the control tower, was invisible.

Annie screamed when the voice came from Bohannon’s wrist.

“Tom, is that you in those Land Rovers?”

Krupp!

“Alex?”

“Yeah. Thank God you guys got here. We would have been forced to turn back soon. So what happened down there? That sandstorm had everything absolutely obliterated. Then, all of a sudden, you guys just appeared. You made it look like Charlton Heston in
The Ten Commandments.
That sandstorm opened up just like the parting of the Red Sea. Pretty cool special effect. Something tells me I know how you pulled it off. Found it, didn’t you?”

“Alex, we’ve got a lot to talk about. But how about you get us out of here?”

“We’re on our way. Wait for us at the western end of the runway. We’ll be down in less than two minutes.”

Kabir’s driver pulled up to the concrete about two-thirds of the way down, his vehicle facing the runway. Bohannon noticed that Whalen’s car continued on another twenty or thirty yards and came to a stop with its front windshield facing away from the runway.
Precautions. Just like Whalen.

As they all piled out of the Rovers, Tom could see the jet turning into its approach run to the air base from the east. There wasn’t a lot of time. Rodriguez was pulling gear out of the car. “Go ahead. Say goodbye,” said Joe. “I’ll be there in a minute.” Tom, Annie, and Rizzo walked toward the other Land Rover.

Mike Whalen met Tom halfway as Annie and Rizzo continued toward Kabir. Tom turned toward the ex–Navy SEAL, another man to whom they owed their lives.