Greg Bear: Quantico

They might as well be blind. Within the hour, Fouad was sure, the settlers would launch their fireworks. From the minibus, they would look up to see the starbursts and know they had failed. They would share in the fate of all the faithful passing below them.

Yet God was merciful.

William sat by a middle window, scanning the hordes and the traffic. Rebecca sat in the seat opposite, communicating directly with Jane Rowland on the Heinlein . They had not recovered the settler’s phone signal. Someone in Mecca was jamming across a wide spread of frequencies. The jamming could be penetrated but it would take time.

‘They’re on to something,’ Amir told Fouad as they listened. ‘Someone high up thinks there’s going to be trouble.’

‘If there’s anybody actually in charge,’ Mahmud added. ‘Doesn’t look very organized.’

Fouad stared at Al-Husseini’s neck and head above the back of the driver’s seat. ‘It is time to join the pilgrims on foot,’ Fouad said. They were wearing nondescript khakis. Amir pulled black berets from a duffel bag, complete with red and green chevrons, silver pins, and enameled Hajj security medallions. He handed around the insignia, authentic enough to pass at least an amateur inspection.

They finished quickly. Pilgrims overflowing onto the overpass peered through the minibus windows with sleepy curiosity. Al-Husseini glared back. ‘This is not a good place to begin a search, if you are on foot,’ he announced. Without warning, he started the bus and honking madly, with little regard for the crowd, he rejoined the flow of vehicles in the center lanes.

Their pace was still agonizingly slow. The entire world moved like thick jam. Outside, the temperature was already ninety-three degrees. The sun burned like a torch and a hot puff through the open windows instantly dried their sweatdamp hair.

Captain Periglas peered over Jane’s shoulder. ‘We must have fifteen thousand midges out there,’ he said. ‘Close-up and personal isn’t working. We have a UAV at altitude taking some synthetic aperture radar scans-SAR. Let’s get clever. We’ll shoot ten or twenty high-rez radar images of the entire town, then use our visual search engine to locate every truck in the area above a certain size. That’ll narrow it down a little.’

‘Might work,’ Dalrymple said when the captain had moved to another section of the TSC. ‘We’re pretty good at pickin’ fleas from black sand.’

Jane was still searching for the phone signal when Dalrymple switched their gog displays to a fresh SAR scan of Mina. Combined with earlier scans from several angles, resolution was down to twenty centimeters. The ship’s computers almost instantly drew more than a thousand red circles on the densely detailed false-color image. Jane focused on the grid defined by the King Abdul Aziz Overpass, then the road of the same name-just a few hundred yards from the boundary that defined Mina to pilgrims-and the King Khalid Overpass.

A fire had started just east of the Mina Mosque. The hotspot and plume of smoke was clearly visible as she switched between an infrared image and the SAR composite. The next IR image came in five minutes later and revealed that the fire had almost doubled in size and more fires had sprung up throughout the tent camp, some creeping to the vicinity of the Al Malim Mosque.

Supposedly the tents were fireproofed.

Something was going very wrong down there.

‘Let’s track any vehicle longer than ten meters,’ the captain said. That reduced the number of circles down to a few hundred. ‘Now compare with the latest scan and see how many of them are moving and how fast.’

Twenty-five were on the move. Most were crawling along in the general syrup of humanity and traffic.

‘Get me a sat microwave contour of the same region. Let’s see who’s trying to break through the jamming.’

‘Watch this,’ Dalrymple said to Jane.

The display colors abruptly changed to red and green. Purple smudges of radiated microwave energy-minus the normal background for warm objects-spread quickly, combined, threatened to dominate, and then fixed-a huge bouquet covering nearly all of Mina. The computers selected for intensity, reducing the smudges to dots, then cross-referenced with the truck positions and attached five dots to moving vehicles longer than ten meters.

‘Let’s get some sharp-eyed midges on those trucks,’ the captain ordered.

‘So much for OSMOs,’ Jane commented.

‘It’s that damned slaughterhouse,’ Dalrymple said. ‘We didn’t take that into account. Too much blood and stuff in the air. And there’s a lot of smoke. Jesus, look at the fires.’

‘What’s causing them?’ Jane asked.

‘Not a clue,’ Dalrymple said.

Periglas leaned over Jane’s shoulder again. He pointed to the northernmost expanse of the tents, tens of thousands of them. Jane zoomed in on the latest optical scan until she found herself staring down at blocky images of men with guns-soldiers? Security?-marching in groups of ten or twenty between rows of closely spaced tents, followed by light armored vehicles.

‘They’re searching for somebody or something, and they don’t seem to care what they torch or who they kill,’ Periglas said.

Jane relayed this immediately to Rebecca.

‘We can see them,’ Rebecca said. ‘They’re not regulars-they’re wearing khakis, robes, business suits-carrying every sort of weapon imaginable-we can’t tell what the hell authority they’re working under.’

She turned to William, then to Fouad. Both were sitting on the right side of the minibus, toward the front, keeping an eye on a nearby band of gunmen paralleling their course. Amir and Mahmud took the rear, facing forward, their own guns held low so as not to attract attention. Al-Husseini wasn’t able to drive much faster than the armed men could walk.

‘Hold on,’ William said.

‘Fighting ahead,’ Al-Husseini called over his shoulder. ‘There is a roadblock.’

Bullets pinged off the masonry of a building to their left. This caused the armed men on their right to return fire-in all directions. The minibus came to an abrupt halt and Al-Husseini turned off the engine. The windows on the right side shattered. Grange crouched and frog-marched behind a seat. Rebecca was already flat on the ridged rubber matting that ran down the aisle. William crawled forward just in time to grab at Al-Husseini. With Fouad, he tried to keep the man from pushing the door open and fleeing. They struggled as more shots blew out the windshield and the remaining windows on their left. Bullets flew from all around. Men and women in the streets were shrieking.

‘We must go!’ Al-Husseini pleaded. ‘They are brigands. They are here to disrupt the Hajj. We have guns-we must fight them!’

Fouad pushed him between two seats and he and William hemmed in the Saudi with their bodies. William twisted to stare down the aisle at Rebecca. More fire raked the roof, tearing up the liner and blowing out air conditioner vents. Pieces of plastic rained down.

Rebecca brushed away pebbles of glass and shouted forward, ‘Fouad, what can you see?’

Jane clearly heard the nightmare outside the minibus. Dalrymple icily worked through his displays as Periglas spoke with Grange about the locations of the rest of Fouad’s team. She didn’t seem to have anything to do. With half-numb fingers, she resumed what she had been doing earlier-this time using the pinpoint locations of the five trucks they had tracked with the IR and SAR images. She demanded and received access to a high-altitude vehicle and narrowed the UAV and satellite sensors, breaking through the jamming just long enough to catch a burst of Hebrew, or what sounded like Hebrew, she couldn’t be sure until the female translator in the United States spoke up.