Wrath & Righteousnes Episodes 01 to 05 (79 page)

It might be he couldn’t do it. He might back out of the plan!

They could see that he was weak and vulnerable. Even now, he could still reason. He could think! His judgment hadn’t been utterly clouded. He still understood right from wrong. What he was going to do was so evil; they could not give him time to think. So they kept up the constant noise and evil chants in his ears.

Although they could discern his thoughts only from the look on his face, they saw the hesitation and uncertainty, the concern for his brothers and the children that he knew. They saw the soft light of goodness, and they worked in a panic to crush it out. It was critical now to keep their Enemy and His bright soldiers at bay. He would certainly try to stop them, and they
could not
lose this man.

This was the moment they had been waiting for. This was the tipping point, the start of the Great War. So they had to keep this man panicked; they had to keep the hate and confusion in his head. They had to keep him from thinking of what he was about to do.

So they hissed and they danced and they cried in the air. They swooped and leaned toward him, swearing and lying in his head.

“Do it! It is good!”
they lied in his ear.
“It is right! God will reward you! Now go! Go and kill!”

The Israeli pilot had his head down in the cockpit, watching his targeting screen. The time-to-go display showed fifteen seconds to go. The crosshairs lay exactly over the targets. Altitude, twenty-four thousand feet. Airspeed, four-eighty. On time. On target. The time-to-go display now showed ten seconds to go.

He glanced up and checked his leader, who was half a mile ahead and twenty degrees to his right. He looked down and flipped the master arm switch, giving the final release command to his bombs. Seconds later, he felt a sudden snap as the pins fired and the two bombs dropped away. His aircraft bobbed up from the sudden reduction in weight, and he pushed the nose down. He banked the jet up and jammed the throttle up to military power, then watched over his shoulder, keeping the target in sight. He wanted to see the two explosions before he turned back to base.

* * *

The two bombs fell silently through the dark night. They separated gradually as they moved toward their targets, but always remained abeam from each other as they slipped through the thin atmosphere. Two hundred feet after dropping from the undercarriage of the F-16, the bombs had reached terminal velocity. Small propellers popped out from the cores, spinning in the wind to arm the warheads. Then the nose cones slowly dropped, the miniature steering fins at the back of the bombs guiding the weapons with adjustments that were too quick to see.

Fifteen thousand feet and falling. Twenty-one seconds to go.

* * *

Seven thousand feet below the bombs, the Saudi’s cell phone rang. Eyes wide in terror, he stared at it, and then shook his head.

So many voices.

So much confusion.

So many spinning thoughts inside his brain.

* * *

The air turned from crisp and cold to warm and wet as the bombs fell, the humidity and heat of the ocean warming the lower atmosphere. The bombs made no sound but a soft
whoosh,
like the wings of an angel that slipped through the dark night.

Eight thousand feet and falling.

Little more than ten seconds to go.

* * *

The Saudi’s telephone continued ringing, its high-pitched tone seeming to pierce the dark night like the cry of a child from some tin-covered pit. Moving slowly, he flipped the phone open and placed it at the side of his head. “NOW!” he heard his master’s voice scream in his ear.

The Saudi mumbled something, but he didn’t do anything.

“NOW!” he heard his master scream once again. Although thirty miles away, his voice was as clear as if he were standing right next to him. “Now! Hit the trigger! You know what to do!”

The Saudi took a breath and looked down at the trigger in his palm. He closed his eyes and pressed the button.

And that was all he knew.

* * *

The flash from the nuclear device illuminated the night, turning it into a brazen, white day. The light was unnaturally bright, like the surface of the sun, with tongues of white fire that flashed across the entire sky. Like a burst of stark lightning on the darkest night, the blazing strobe of nuclear power flashed, blinding and burning every eye that was unfortunate enough to see.

The Israeli pilot glanced over his shoulder as he banked his aircraft to the north, and though he didn’t see the flash, he felt the piercing heat penetrating his eyes, as if a white-hot, burning needle had been jammed in his skull. Immediately blinded, he cried out in pain.

Confused, terrified, he rubbed at his eyes. He heard his formation leader begin to call him, his panicked voice crying over the radio. Then the heat blast fell upon them, tearing their little fighters apart.

The shock wave moved across the ground at the speed of sound, a wall of heat and energy that burned up or exploded everything in its path. Then the awesome wind followed, blowing out everything before it in a powerful explosion of superheated air that suddenly reversed to fill the vacuum that was left from the nuclear fireball.

Across the ghettos and slums and neighborhoods of Gaza, there was fire and heat and nuclear radiation as the nuclear explosion destroyed everything in its path. There were crumbled buildings, burning rubble, and melted concrete and steel. Pain and death were everywhere.

From ground zero to four miles out from the core of the explosion, only a few were left alive. From four to seven miles out, most were burned or radiated beyond what they could survive. From eight miles out, the devastation was survivable, but one hundred twenty thousand were dead or dying inside the ring of fire.

The mushroom cloud rolled up into the night sky, an orange-and-red fireball that seemed to churn and boil and feed on itself, growing larger and more violent as it climbed into the upper atmosphere. The flash of white light and the burning fireball could be seen for hundreds of miles, each sign announcing the change of times to the world.

The radar picture from the American AWACS circling over the Mediterranean Sea suddenly collapsed on itself, seeming to suck into a small dot at the middle of the screen before it snapped and disappeared. The image was replaced by noisy static, and the members of the White House national security team seemed to pause and take a breath as one. A couple of them turned to each other and shrugged their shoulders. The watch supervisor sitting behind a glass-enclosed cubicle at the back of the room pressed a button under his desk, calling on the IT staff. The screen had lost connectivity, he figured, and he needed it fixed
right now
!

General Brighton stood without moving, staring at the blank screen, a sinking feeling in his gut.

The president turned to the vice president. “What happened to our picture?” he asked.

The vice president looked confused, and then reached for a button on the communications panel directly in front of him. But before he could do anything, the room was filled with a panicked voice that was filled with fear and cold dread. “Bull’s-eye, this is Falcon,” the pilot called before his voice was swallowed up in static.

“Who the devil is Falcon?” the president demanded.

The controller inside the glass cubical answered the question. “Falcon is the call sign for the AWACS reconnaissance aircraft flying over the Mediterranean Sea.”

“What does he—”

The president stopped talking when the AWACS pilot started broadcasting again. “Bull’s-eye, this is Falcon. We’ve got . . . fire . . . into the sky!”

The president hesitated. What was he talking about? He jammed his finger against the broadcast button on the communications pod. “Falcon, what are you saying?” he demanded in a sharp voice.

“Bull’s-eye. We’ve had . . . explosion over the Gaza Strip. Repeat, we’ve . . . nuclear fireball. It looks like . . . holy . . . .” The pilot’s voice trailed off, crackling with the static that was building from the electromagnetic disturbance in the upper atmosphere. “It looks like,” his voice came back after a moment of white noise, “it looks like the Israelis have just nuked all of Gaza and half of Egypt as well!”

The world sat in stunned and breathless silence for almost a day. Shock. Trauma. Terror. The emotions boiled high. Like a man who’d been shot, the world seemed look down in surprise, astonished to see the blood begin to seep from his chest. The pain would come, but it was slow, the shock keeping the anguish at bay.

Rescue operations were sluggish and cumbersome, for the area was so radiated that it was impossible to work. The dead remained in the streets of Gaza. Without assistance, many of the sick and the injured died, and the stench of rot filled the air.

Devastation and destruction. More than 140,000 dead. Five thousand more had died in the first day alone.

Israel pleaded with the world, declaring its innocence. “We did not do it! We did not do it!” they cried.

But no one believed them. The evidence was in and it was crystal clear. Everyone had
seen
what had happened. It was too obvious to deny. The Jews had been desperate. They had panicked. In a moment of fear and rage, they had overreacted in the most horrible way.

And now they had to pay the price. A hundred forty thousand dead and dying Palestinians could simply not be denied.

* * *

The president of the United States made a quick statement, begging for a calm and measured response to the attack. “We don’t really know what happened,” he declared to the world. “We must be patient. We must be careful. We must not condemn until we know. And we will stand by our ally until we know who to blame. Israel is our closest friend and our most important ally in the region, and we will not desert them until we have proof they are responsible for the attack.”

But everyone knew that was what the U.S. president would say. No one listened to him. They were finished listening to him now.

The first world leader to speak after the U.S. president was the Secretary-General of the U.N. The lead diplomat stood before the General Assembly in an emergency meeting, his white hair shining brightly under the television lights. His voice rose and fell with emotion. He was on key, a perfect delivery, indignant and full of self-righteousness. “What we have just witnessed,” the Secretary-General began, “is nothing but genocide. Ethnic cleansing and vile hatred of the very worst kind! Not since the last century has our planet, our home, been polluted by a nuclear device. Not since the closing days of World War II have so many innocent people died. How many guiltless Palestinian families were killed yesterday? How many more are dying even as I stand here? How many more will die before the death count is complete?

“We must identify and punish those Jewish leaders who have committed this atrocity. We must hold them accountable for the genocide. Crimes against humanity cannot be simply swept away. And we must ensure that the people who supported them will be held accountable as well.

“And then, my fellow leaders, we must consider the next step to take.

“How many years now has the world been roiled in strife? Since the founding of Israel, we’ve seen nothing but war. There is no peace, and there will be no peace, until we take the next step.”

He left the next step undefined, but everyone knew what he meant.

“Do we need any more excuse,” the Secretary-General completed, “or have you finally seen enough? Have we need of further evidence than what we were shown yesterday? I think not. I think not.”

Within an hour of his speech, the European Union made a formal statement, condemning the state of Israel as well as any who had supported them in this most horrendous attack. Already, European Muslim immigrants, almost fifty million in all, were rioting in the streets, demanding justice, demanding punishment, demanding the destruction of Israel and the United States. Watching their own streets erupt in Muslim fury, the European leaders cowered. They knew that the immigrants had been growing in numbers, but now there were so many. And they were so strong! So many Muslims. So much fury. They could wield a furious power of destruction if the leaders didn’t tread carefully.

On the evening of the second day, the United Nations Security Council met in an emergency session. It was almost midnight when the meeting got under way, and for the first time in the history of the U.N., the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was not allowed to attend. A security delegation of the General Assembly stood at the doorway to keep him from entering the Security Council room.

The U.S. ambassador protested and argued, but it didn’t change anything, and the meeting was called to order with him standing outside the closed door. For almost ten minutes he stood there, looking like a fool to the gloating press, then finally left in a rage, disappearing down the winding stairs.

The French ambassador called the meeting to order. “Israel has created an enormous problem,” he started. “One that will be extremely difficult to deal with, I’m sure you agree. And yes, it is true that Israel must be punished, and we, as a body, must soon turn our attention to that. What will happen to her, I don’t know, I don’t think anyone can predict. It will be dire. It will be unpleasant, but we have to remember this: The problem isn’t only Israel. The much greater problem is the United States.”

The German and Russian ambassadors all nodded, clapping their hands to agree. The Chinese delegate remained silent. This was all good to him. The English ambassador huffed for a moment, and then remembered the twelve million Muslims who lived inside England now. He remembered the strident anti-American candidates who had gained so much power in the local elections. He considered the anti-Semites who had become brazen now, picking up power at almost every turn. He remembered the pictures he had seen of the nuclear explosion over Gaza, the charred and burning bodies, the dead children on the street. He remembered all this, then sat quietly and listened.