Warren Murphy: Arabian Nightmare

Chapter 39

The launch plumes dappling the Iraiti landscape were visible from orbit. Central Intelligence Agency analysts counted over a thousand-which puzzled them because it was more than double the number of Scuds known to be in the Iraiti inventory.

It took hours, but they figured out that some of the flashes were not launch plumes but points of impact. All were well within the borders of Irait, another puzzle.

This intelligence was relayed to the Pentagon, which could make no sense of it, to the White House, which took great pleasure in it, and to Praetor Winfield Scott Hornworks, at that moment riding atop a Marine amphibious assault vehicle through liberated Kuran City like a pasha astride a pink elephant.

It was not obviously a Marine land vehicle, since its angular lines were concealed by a pink fiberglass shell in the shape of a fifteen-foot-high sow. It bounced along like a parade float, its squiggly tail whipping up and down.

An upright pig walked up to the sow and doffed its pink piglike gas mask.

"Sir, intelligence reports the Scud and fighter-jet threat to be completely suppressed," said the pig, actually a centurion with the Praetorian Sues, formerly the Presidential Guard.

"He did it, dang his yellow bones!" whooped Praetor Hornworks, waving a silver standard topped by an eagle and emblazoned with the letters CPQA. "That old gook did it! We liberated Kuran without suffering a single casualty. Screw taking the skies. We got total sand superiority! Sues Pacifica rules!"

"Sues Pacifica, sir?"

"The Pigs of Peace, son," Hornworks explained. "Get your snout in a Latin primer sometime. You might learn something useful."

"Does that mean we can climb out of these silly suits, sir? The men are thirsty as hell."

"Whistling up a sandstorm will do that to a centurion," said Hornworks, eyeing the horizon, which seemed to go straight up to Irait without a bump. "Start passing the canteens. It's Miller time."

"Aren't we forbidden to have alcohol, sir? This is a Moslem country, after all."

Praetor Hornworks fixed his centurion with a cold eye. "Son, if any Ay-rab so much as looks at you crossways, you rear up on your hind legs and give him a good loud oink. That'll get up his skirts worse than the sand fleas."

The centurion gave a snappy salute. "Yes, sir!"

Praetor Winfield Scott Hornworks returned to searching the northern horizon line. Somewhere up there, the Master of Sinanju roamed. The final phase of Operation Dynamic Eviction was in his hands. Hornworks hoped he had it in him. The old guy had looked as old as Confucius. And twice as tired. Hornworks had never seen a man look so tired. Like he had come to the end of his string, with maybe one last errand to finish before he cashed himself out.

The question was: how was he going to decapitate Maddas and his command structure without a passel of B-52's backing him up?

Chapter 40

The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran was alerted to the impending incursion by the president of neighboring Afghanistan.

"Why are you telling us this?" asked the speaker of the Iranian Parliament suspiciously. The two nations were not known for being on friendly terms.

"So you understand the scourge coming your way is not sent by us," replied the president of Afghanistan. "We have lost enough troops to the scourge."

"Scourge? Are the Russians coming?"

"These are not Russians. The Russians refused to come to our assistance. They were smarter than us, who have thrown away two crack divisions against the scourge."

Since such a high opinion of Russian intelligence was virtually unheard-of in the Islamic world, the speaker of Iran's Parliament took the warning to heart.

"What is it you suggest we do?" he asked carefully.

"Pray to Allah that the scourge is not intent upon gobbling up your nation and only wishes to pass through."

"Gobble?"

"You will know of its approach by the trembling of the ground and the singing," the Afghan president went on. "One will bring fear to your heart and the other tears of joy to your face. The scourge itself, however, will bring ruin to your armies if they dare stand in its path."

"If it is Allah's will that this be done, who are we to challenge the will of Allah?" asked the speaker.

"I trust that was a rhetorical question," returned the Afghan president dryly. "For it would be better that you spit in Allah's eye than contemplate victory over the monster approaching your border."

"Spoken like a godless tool of the Communists," spat the speaker.

"Perhaps. But my nation is still intact. Will yours be, come the morrow?"

The line went dead.

The speaker of the Iranian Parliament went to a wall map. He picked out the point where the creature or power the Afghan had called the scourge would cross their mutual border.

He saw that the path would take this scourge through the sands of the Dasht-i-Kavir Desert, south of Tehran.

Since he did not wish to lose his republic for the sake of a useless desert, the speaker put in a call to the Iranian president, with whom he reluctantly shared power.

"Should we not defend the revolution?" demanded the president after he had heard the speaker through. "For it is truly written that submission to Allah's will is not to be avoided."

"No," the speaker said thoughtfully. "For if I read my map correctly, this scourge of the Afghans is bent upon reaching the criminal Iraiti nation."

"Allah be praised."

Chapter 41

The city of Abominadad was the cradle of human civilization. Erected at a particularly sinuous twist of the Tigris River, it had birthed the first alphabet, the art of writing, astronomy, algebra, and a long line of kings that had included the most powerful and despotic in history.

Destroyed many times over the centuries, Abominadad had always been rebuilt. Always larger. Always to grow to greater power, more grandiose aspirations.

And while the center of earthly civilization had shifted to Persia, then Egypt, Greece, Rome, England, and, in the twentieth century, the unknown and unguessable Western land known as America, Abominadad patiently tore down her old towers and threw up new ones. She prospered, expanded, and, most important, dreamed. Waiting for the desert stars to favor her again.

In the late twentieth century, some five million Arabs dwelt in Abominadad-more human beings than had populated the young globe when her first minaret was erected in the storied days no eye living today had beheld.

Of them, no Iraiti ear had ever heard the haunting sound that swelled across the Tigris.

Yet all five million inhabitants of Abominadad felt their blood run cold when they first caught that sound. Fear clutched at every heart. Hands shook.

It was a sound, high and haunting, that they understood in their souls. It burned in their blood. It resonated in racial memories. Fathers had imitated that sound, teaching it to sons, and sons to grandsons. Although it had become diluted, imperfect, half-forgotten, every Iraiti from the mountainous Turkish border to southern salt marshes had learned to approximate the sound that keened through the dry air.

It was a call of defiance and a knell of doom.

And as it sliced the sky, pure and crystalline, it brought a startled silence from the city. The muezzin froze in their minarets, the call "Allaaah Akbaaar" dying in their suddenly tight throats. The women withdrew to their homes like black crows seeking shelter from a storm. The children sought their mothers.

And the men, who alone knew the true significance of that cosmic sound, made haste to gather up their clan.

For the first time in generations, Abominadad was about to be evacuated. Not because of the threat of falling bombs and raining missiles. Not because of pestilence. Not even because of fire.