The Shroud of Heaven (43 page)

The accusation hit Saeed like a blow, driving him back a step, but Kismet did not relent. He turned to fully face the other man, tensing his muscles in readiness as he hurled the final verbal assault. “I’m sure your brother would be proud.”

As the Iraqi staggered back another step, Kismet saw his chance. But in the instant he leapt from his perch, fully intending to pounce on Saeed in order to wrestle the gun away, the other man was abruptly swept off his feet. From out of nowhere, Chiron had launched a simultaneous attack, tackling the Iraqi to the metal deck. Even before Kismet’s feet touched down, the noise of a gunshot, muffled by the close proximity of bodies, punctuated the violence of the action.

Kismet landed badly twisting his right ankle and sprawled headlong, but in the grip of adrenaline, barely felt the pain. He sprang to his feet and charged at the writhing tangled shape that was Saeed and Chiron. The gun roared again, and a scarlet mist appeared for an instant in the air above them. Then Pierre Chiron, who had once attacked and defeated a similarly armed killer with only his umbrella, rolled away, clutching ineffectually at the gushing torrent of crimson that boiled from his chest.

***

In the instant that Kismet made his leap from the turret, a very different struggle was reaching its climax three hundred meters below. Phillipe Baudoin, the acting chief engineer stared anxiously at his wristwatch, then wiped a hand across his forehead. He had tacitly promised Kismet that the last-ditch plan to thwart the madman atop the tower would be in place in one hour. That had been sixty-three minutes ago.

He had expected that there would be delays. Experience had taught him that events rarely proceeded according to plan. Anticipation of these unpredictable but foreseeable problems had been the reason for his original two-hour estimate, but he had been confident that, if only a few things went wrong, he would be able to have the tower pylons wired ahead of the one-hour mark. True to expectations, those problems had become manifest. The supply of copper wire he had requested from the power company had to be drawn from several locations, requiring an unparalleled feat of logistical juggling. Traffic around the tower had snarled to a halt, making it difficult for the trucks to get through. The last shipment had arrived forty minutes after his request, leaving precious little time to splice and coil it around the last remaining pillar. There had been other setbacks. The team on the north pylon had inadvertently wrapped the wire in the wrong direction, and while it had not actually delayed the operation, it was typical of what Americans called Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong, will. Even more frustrating was the evident disappearance of one of his crew leaders. Perhaps the man had succumbed to panic or abandoned his post in a futile effort to warn loved ones. Baudoin knew the missing man, and knew him to ordinarily be of unimpeachable character, but these were not ordinary circumstances.

He had not once stopped to consider the merit of what he had been instructed to do. He had no illusions about the efficacy of depolarizing the tower in order to prevent some kind of catastrophe. Kismet had made it clear that the procedure’s real value was as a psychological bargaining chip with the madman high above, and as such, it really didn’t matter whether they completed the job or not, so long as Chiron believed it done. But Baudoin was driven by a different motivation. He was an engineer, a problem solver, and when he committed to a course of action, he would settle for nothing less than absolute success.

“Phillipe,” crackled a voice from his walkie-talkie. It was Renny on the south pylon. He held the radio to his ear and glanced up to the sloping column where the last section of wire was being strung. The whole affair seemed like some insane Christmas decoration. “Go ahead.”

“”Phillipe, it is done!”

Baudoin heaved a sigh of relief and checked his watch one last time. Sixty-five minutes. “All teams get clear of the tower. I will activate the system in twenty seconds.”

He continued counting audibly into the speaker as he started the gasoline generator that was spliced into a DC power converter. Although a relatively low voltage was required to create the desired electromagnetic effect, there was no escaping the simple physics. They had used more than a kilometer of copper wire, and it was going to take a lot more than a dry cell battery to make this work. His finger hovered near the switch that would start the flow of electricity into the circuit until finally the moment came. For safety’s sake, he made a final visual sweep of the tower base.

All clear
, he thought, and threw the switch.

A torturously loud humming noise issued from the power converter, followed by a flash of brilliant light. Baudoin did not need to smell the ozone and burnt wiring to know that something had gone wrong. The exact nature of the malfunction eluded him. Perhaps the tower’s intrinsic magnetic field was greater than he had believed, or maybe he had miscalculated the resistance in the line. Whatever the cause, there was no escaping the totality of his failure. He had promised Kismet an oppositely charged electromagnet in order to thwart Chiron’s plan. That wasn’t going to happen.

He could only pray that Kismet had already succeeded in bluffing the madman atop the tower into relenting from his mad scheme. If not…

If not
, Baudoin realized darkly,
I suppose I’ll never know
.

***

Saeed brandished the pistol at Kismet, but he was a fraction of a second too late. Kismet’s left fist wrapped around the barrel and, with a deft twist, he ripped it from the other man’s grasp, but a flailing blow from Saeed knocked the gun away and sent it skittering across the platform. A second strike, directed with more force and intention, caught Kismet in the chest and redirected the momentum of his charge so that he flew over Saeed’s supine form and crashed headlong. He recovered almost instantaneously, but his assailant had likewise regained his senses. Saeed struck first.

There was no hesitancy in the Iraqi’s attack. His hands flew toward Kismet’s throat, his fingers digging into flesh like the talons of a raptor. Kismet instinctively struck at Saeed’s forearms and wrists, but his foe merely pulled himself closer to limit Kismet’s range of motion. Kismet felt his pulse pounding in his veins as the stranglehold tightened. Abandoning the futile defense, he instead launched an attack of his own.

Saeed was a killer, but he wasn’t a fighter. Though his victims during the long years prior to his exile were almost innumerable, they were without exception prisoners, deprived of sleep and food and tortured into submission. As an officer, he had disdained combat training, and now, faced with a battle of the most primitive kind, he had only his atavistic impulses to guide him. It was a poor substitute for skill.

Threading his hands between Saeed’s forearms, Kismet gripped the lapels of the other man’s garment and crossed them over to form a makeshift garrote. Ferocious though it was, Saeed’s assault was ineffectual alongside Kismet’s cross-collar chokehold. The Iraqi’s eyes bulged, first with distress, then from the pressure of depleted blood trapped in the vasculature of his face. Realization dawned, but it was already too late; Saeed’s grip on his neck simply fell away as his oxygen-starved brain ceased transmitting nervous impulses.

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.

Between heaven and earth, a veil.

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=mc
²
—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.