Touchstone (Meridian Series) (38 page)

        And so now, instead of a watery death with Hamza
the Scribe, he would survive this moment—though he could not be certain that any
other future still remained for him.

       He turned to Hamza, tears in his eyes. “How
long…?”

       Hamza smiled. “We have a little while yet. Your
friends will try to call you home soon, though you may not feel the place to be
a home in your heart when you return. They will make an error, a very small one
of course, but then little things have great consequences—or so we have
learned. You will make your return, to a moment when Time may best decide your
fate. I will pray for you, my friend. Allah is merciful to all who abandon the
errors of unbelief, and hear his words.”

       He pointed east, to Mecca, and began to speak, in
a low voice that grew ever more certain, and laced with strength and purpose.

       “How fixed is the order holding together this
material universe above and below us! Yet it must give way before the vast,
unfathomed Truth in which man will see his past and future in true perspective.
To God he owes his life and all its blessings…”

       The voice faded away, and Kelly could feel the
strange sense of feathery lightness that accompanied Time shift. He was going
home.

30

Kelly
awoke
from a short nap
where he lolled on the table at the college library. He rubbed the sleep from
his eyes and looked up at the clock on the wall. Lord! It was half past six
already. Vague recollections of a dream fled from him as he stirred awake. He
remembered a face, a voice, a prayer, yet none of the words made any sense to
him now. He had dozed off, waiting for his computational run to download to his
laptop computer, and now it was surely finished.

       He
got up, walking quickly through the glass doors to the computer lab where he
had his laptop docked in a data recovery bay on the Arion system. Sure enough,
his download had concluded twenty minutes ago, and he was surprised that no one
had come to find him. Time on an Arion system was in high demand these days. He
had to come all the way into the city to use this system, as the closer
facility at U.C. Berkeley was booked solid for the day.  Thankfully, there were
still time blocks open here, probably because of the Memorial Day weekend, he
thought.

       He
rubbed his palms together, as much for warmth as in anticipation of the data he
now had secure in his laptop. The solutions to his convoluted algorithms were
well in hand, now he just had to get to his Subaru and brave the Bay Area
traffic to make the meeting at Nordhausen’s study by eight. He had to get out
of the city, on a rush hour Friday night, over the Bay Bridge and up to
Berkeley, and all in this maddening late spring rain.

       As
he carefully packed his laptop into its carrying case, an ominous rumble of
thunder confirmed his worst fears. The freeways were going to be a nightmare.
In spite of his nap, he was still tired, and hungry, but there was no time for
a meal now. It would take him all of ninety minutes or more to get to Berkeley
under these driving conditions.

       He
zipped up his satchel case and rushed out of the lab, heading for the staircase
that would take him down to the lower floor. When he reached the upper landing
he had the strange feeling that he had forgotten something. He paused suddenly,
nearly tripping up a young female student, who smiled and maneuvered around
him.

       Something
was wrong. He could feel it. Something was out of place… He entertained the
notion for a brief moment, and then started down the library stairs, dismissing
the thought as nonsense.

~

      
Over
five thousand miles and eight hours to the east something
was
wrong. 
Three men were walking down a long tunnel at the back of a hillside, dug into
the side of the island mountain. Outside, the quiet stars shone in the sky, and
the tiny village below them lay sleeping as the hour struck half past two in
the morning. It would be the last hours of peace for this island, the home to
one of the three men for long generations.

       Palma,
in the Canary Islands, was once a secret getaway and waystation for the old
Arabic traders, and Ra’id’s family had purchased land there, a small farm and
hillside villa, ages ago. Over the centuries it had been passed on, from one
generation to the next, and now served as a convenient vacation retreat and
lodge of prayer in the trying times of the year 2010.

       For
Ra’id and his two associates, this was truly a moment of destiny. For years
now, ever since the Americans had come to the Holy Lands again, thirsty for
oil, he had planned and plotted with his brothers for the revenge he knew he
must surely have one day. He was a simple man, grandson of a wealthy merchant
who gained prominence during the first days of the Arab rebellion in the Hejaz.
How strange, he thought, that a Westerner should be the spark that ignited the
rebellion worked by Feisal and the others, his grandfather among them. First it
was to throw off the oppression of the Turks, who had dared set foot in Arabia
at the behest of the German Kaiser in WWI. The Arabs joined with a small
British officer, el Aurens or Lawrence by name, and fought to drive the Turks
from their ancestral lands. It was Lawrence who made the first promise to them,
all those years ago, that they would have freedom if they would but join the
British cause in the war. Now it was another who brought promises of freedom to
the Holy Lands, and the price grew ever higher.

       Ra’id,
and his brothers, determined what they must do. It came to him in the flush of
a night vision, as though Allah himself had opened his eyes. He saw, in his
dream, the family villa, crowned by a searing fire. The earth shook around him
and he knew that the mountain, sleeping quietly since the second great war, was
coming alive again, and belching its red wrath out into the dark waters of the
sea.

       The
island of Palma was largely formed by a great volcanic seamount called Cumbre Vieja.
Each time it erupted, the unstable flank of the island shifted ominously
towards the possibility of total collapse. There was evidence, just off the
western shore, of at least twelve such events in the geological history of the
island. Now, as the years passed, long tubes, once filled with lava, were
saturated with rainwater, and each time the island erupted the water would
superheat, expanding with great explosive force—enough force to shake loose the
entire western flank of the mountain where Ra’id’s villa now sat in the quiet
spring morning.

       When
this happened the resulting landslide would cause an immense tsunami to surge
westward, crossing the whole of the Atlantic in just eight hours. When Ra’id
saw the devastation that even a small tsunami could cause after the Indonesian
Banda Ache earthquake of December 2004, he knew that he had found the perfect
weapon of justice, a mighty sword that he could bring upon the enemies of
Islam. It was then that he changed his name to Husan al Din, the sword of the
faith, and bent himself to the plan that he hoped would bear fruit this very
night.

       With
him in the tunnel were Nassim, the Wind, and his younger brother. It had taken
them many years to acquire the means, and many long hours digging the tunnel
they were now leaving. It burrowed into the heart of the mountain itself,
allowing them to carry the long sought after device, the abomination made in
the West, to its resting place in the heart of the mountain. Nassim had set the
timer, and now all was set in motion.

       They
reached the end of the tunnel and went up the narrow staircase that led to the
villa. There would be time enough to clean themselves, and to pray, before the
chartered helo would arrive to take them from the island. Ra’id would stay, and
endure the fire in holy sacrifice, but his companions convinced him that he
should live on to fight again, should anything go wrong.

       He
stepped out onto the veranda, feeling the cool ocean breeze on his face and
looking down at the herd of puffy white clouds that seemed to circle the
island, dappled with moonlight. The night blue waters of the sea were calm now,
but soon, he knew, they would rise up in a torrent of retribution. His only
regret was that this, his sanctuary for so many years, would be vaporized as
the sword fell upon his enemies, the island itself devastated, and many
friends, companions of long years, lost. Yet there was nothing to be done now.
The night was upon them, the time was at hand. Even the mountain itself seemed
to stir awake, as if it sensed the impending catastrophe that was now only
minutes away.

       Soon
he heard the distant thrum of the helo, flying high up, but descending rapidly
as was planned.

       “Come
Nassim,” he called. “It is time…”

       Things
have a way of reaching their perfect end, he thought. Did the Americans think
they could rape our lands, plunder our wealth, occupy the soil of Islam without
consequence? Bush the elder had been brazen, his son even moreso, and foolish.
Now the West would pay for their misdeeds. It had taken him many years of
waiting and prayer to accomplish his task. But as the Arabs were fond of
saying,
‘A’athreh ib dafra,’
with a stumble and a kick, he would achieve
his great aim at last. A night of fire, a night of wind and water and earth,
all conspiring together to work the retribution, ere the sun rises. It was not
his doing, of course, but the will of Allah that he worked with this moment. He
was already composing the words of the announcement that he would make to the
shocked world when the true magnitude of his plan would finally become
apparent.

      
‘…We
are patient, forgiving. We are seekers only of peace, but as Allah chooses,
then the command is given for the seas to rise and pound the shore. We are but
an instrument, to that power. As the oceans are made up of an uncountable
number of individual drops of serene waters, when Allah commands, those drops
come together to form the most powerful force on earth, the ocean of Believers,
who's waves of faith become the hammer upon
which justice is delivered
to all followers of Satan.’

~

When
the fifteen kiloton nuclear device they had buried
in Cumbre Vieja exploded just over an hour later, that certainty became a
reality. The mountain, rudely jarred by the abomination in its gut, exploded
with a fury that  was unsurpassed. And just as Steven Ward, Simon Day and a
handful of other Western scientists had warned for so many years, the unstable
flank gave way, sending well over 500 cubic kilometers of rock into the sea in
a mad surging avalanche. The resulting wave set was enormous, and it fanned out
from the island, rolling west in dark swells of ocean at the speed of some 600
km per hour. In just under three hours it had swamped the Azores. Three more
would find its angry waves upon the shore of Newfoundland. After that, the
entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States would be engulfed by the sea. It
would be four a.m. in the Canary Islands when the mountain would explode, midnight
for the Americans, four hours behind. They would not hear of the disaster for
over an hour, those that remained awake, but soon the sirens would blare out a
warning. The 24 hour news stations would ignite the fire of panic as the orders
to evacuate the entirety of the eastern coast of the United States were finally
given an hour later. That would leave only five hours, perhaps six, to try and
move over a hundred million people to the safety of some inland refuge. Most,
sleeping in the dark of the night, would never even hear the warning, in spite
of the rising commotion.

       It was just by chance that Kelly heard it
that evening, as he peered through the  squeaking windshield wipers of his
midnight blue Subaru. He had just finished listening to a custom CD collection
of Frank Zappa guitar solos, and when the disk popped out the he caught a
snatch of the news that was rapidly becoming the story of the decade all across
America that night. He caught the word tsunami, adjusted the volume, and tuned
in the station to hear better.

       A few moments later he was utterly aghast at
what was happening, and the odd sensation that something was terribly amiss
seized him. He had been musing over the numbers in his laptop, and wondering if
all the calculations he had run for tomorrow’s mission were in order. They had
planned to see a Shakespeare play, the
Tempest
, but now, it was clearly
all around them, rising in headlong degrees with each passing moment. As the
realization of the catastrophe settled over him, he vocalized his first
reaction. “Damn…looks like we aren’t going to see the play tomorrow. How could
we? We’ve got to do something about this—do something to prevent it!” But he
could not think of anything they could achieve, even with the power of Time
travel at their disposal, if the project worked at all.

       Up in the quiet of the Berkeley Hills, just
above the university, the Arch was already spinning to life, watched by a few
interns as they ramped up the power to a low standby mode. Jen was there, and
Tom. The others were waiting for him at Nordhausen’s study in the Berkeley
suburbs, Maeve, Paul and Robert.