The Last Day (2 page)

2

Mount Ramon Observatory, Negev Desert, southern Israel 11:57
P.M
., Friday, December 24,1999

A
t this late hour, four Japanese astronomers were hunched over an assortment of infrared monitors, spectroscopes and optical instruments, gazing skyward from the open deck of Israel's only celestial observatory. Bundled against the cold, the men were special guests of the Israeli Ministry of Science, on leave from Kyoto University, Japan. The latitude and dry atmosphere of the southern Israeli desert was ideal for studying this, the largest meteor phenomenon in two thousand years, as the earth passed tonight through the Geminids asteroid belt. Already the astronomers had recorded hundreds of encounters.

“With all this activity, you would think a few might survive the descent,” one colleague commented in Japanese to no one in particular.

“Yes,” another replied. “It would be exciting to collect a fresh specimen.”

In fact, at the very foot of Mount Ramon lay the scars of several ancient meteorite craters, the only such sites in the Middle East, stretching for miles across the great rift of the Negev Valley. But the scientists were uninterested in things terrestrial. Their eyes were fixed firmly on the heavens.

Quite unexpectedly, the most senior fellow of the group noticed in his instrument one meteor far brighter and larger than typical. Lips trembling, he rose slowly from his chair to confirm the sighting with unaided eyes. Certain of himself now, he blurted out in exhilaration, “Gentlemen, I think we have an impact!”

He and his associates gaped with fascination as the light grew rapidly in size and intensity. It hurtled directly toward them on a flat trajectory, from approximately thirty degrees above the eastern horizon. The younger men remained spellbound only long enough for the danger to register, then abruptly abandoned their posts for the questionable cover of a nearby table. The senior astronomer, however, stood his ground, avidly absorbing every detail as the object passed well overhead.

In its flight across the Negev, the fiery mass illuminated a large swath of craggy mountains and rambling desert valleys. Its brilliant passing scattered the livestock of bewildered nomads, frightened an elderly Bedouin couple traveling in a donkey-driven cart and roused various camps of millenarian pilgrims paused on their way to the Holy City of Jerusalem to celebrate the New Year 2000.

Nor did the meteor elude the detection of Israeli Air Defense. Coincidental with the astronomers’ first sighting, an image was captured on radar at an Israeli military airfield, located near the southern side of the mountain.

“God damn!” a stunned sentry shouted in alarm, jolted out of his complacency by a conspicuous blip emerging on his screen. His fellow sentries were at his side in an instant, squinting closely at the object, each finding it hard to accept that the peaceful state of Jordan was the seeming point of origin.

“Code D, hostile,” a telemetry specialist made the call. But having never seen the likes of this, he couldn't identify it. “Too small for a plane,” he decided, “too fast for a cruise missile, too low to be a Scud.”

The officer of the watch, frantically trying to determine the exact source and direction of the invader, sounded a full-scale alert, scrambling aircraft and enabling batteries of Super-Patriot missiles. But there was no time for an intercept. The object was already across the border and rapidly losing altitude.

3

Negev Research Institute, Negev Desert, southern Israel 11:59
P.M
., Friday, December 24,1999

R
ising up stark and indifferently out of the weathered rock and red sands of a secluded desert canyon, an imposing glass-and-steel structure lay directly in the path of the meteor. As if to direct the oncoming visitor, there were two wings to the complex that converged in a large V. At their intersection sat a huge geodesic bubble, its one-way bronze glass reflecting multiples of the oncoming fireball.

“Israeli Negev Research Institute,” the installation proclaimed itself in bold Hebrew and English signage. For years, the Israelis had professed this to be a biotechnology laboratory, but the center was known to be affiliated with the Israeli Defense Force and considered by neighboring countries and U.S. intelligence to be a major military research and development facility. Fully fenced and guarded by motor patrols, the institute was aglow with activity.

Inside the dome was a multitiered laboratory of dazzling complexity. The huge infrastructure was composed of seven separate levels, each suspended from a central supporting shaft. Set well back from the dome, each floor afforded an open, cinemascopic view of the night sky.

The institute was staffed by scores of preoccupied technicians tending a vast, layered network of cybersystems. Lengthy arrays of electronics at the top level fed downward into banks of computers on the next, which interacted with lower levels of endless coiled tubing. These, in turn, percolated clear fluids into an ever-descending sub-strata of processors, filters, auxiliary systems and convoluted bionetworks.

Eventually leaching its way to ground level, the refined alchemy met up with the sole recipient of all this mass science: a virtually motionless, naked human figure, submerged in dark amber fluid in a transparent sealed rectangular vessel. The still form lay on its side, doubled up in a fetal position, legs tucked, arms drawn into its chest.

But the figure was much larger than a fetus. The physique was slight, adult and female.

The body floated pale and free in soft spotlights, attended by assorted monitors and scholarly men and women. Its entire head was encased in a helmeted Medusa of electrodes and spiraling wires. These attachments fed into a port in the back of the holding tank and continued upward in spreading branches to unite with the various technologies above. A larger tube, the thickness of a garden hose, meandered its way from the gut of the body, out the top of the vessel to disappear in a tangle of connections overhead.

Beyond the figure, separated and off to one side like a couple of abandoned prototypes, were two identical female forms in similar support vessels. Their heads were also encased in helmets but only partially linked into the labyrinth above. Each, however, bore umbilical hoses which tapped into the grand placental network.

To the other side of the showcased subject, the scientists were focusing their attention on monitors displaying three-dimensional, holographic images of a human brain. Visible within the brain were thirteen distinctly nonorganic devices. Thin square wafers less than a millimeter in size, the objects were distributed deep within the cerebral hemispheres.

Originating from each device were wisps of ultrafine fibers which collected into tiny threads. The threads traveled up through the brain tissue, penetrated the skull, then migrated under the scalp to a central gathering point in a larger wafer attached to the back of the skull. From here, a single, coiled wire emerged from the scalp and through the helmet to join the mechanisms and monitors beyond. Next to the monitors were other displays, including EEG screens, which recorded wildly active readings.

“My God, look at this one!” A gratified administrator summoned his charges, and they converged to marvel at the progress of their work. “This is a historic moment, ladies and gentlemen,” he crowed, taking full advantage of the euphoria to squeeze an attractive female assistant next to him. “We're about to steal a page from the Book of Genesis!”

Inside the central vessel, the slumbering form would twitch occasionally, reminiscent of an infant's startle reflex. Hunched down, observing this closely, was a frail, elderly, white-haired gentleman in lab coat and tie. The vessel's glass reflected his troubled frown. “What have I done!” he reproached himself softly. “God forgive me, what have I done!”

Just before the fireball impacted, there was a synchronized moment when all in attendance sensed the ominous presence, suspended operations, and turned in spellbound unison to fathom the approaching spectacle of their doom.

Steadily disintegrating in its fiery descent, sloughing off hot chunks of itself to the desert floor below, the core mass of the object was still sizable as it plunged into the swollen dome of the complex. Tearing through layers of whirring cybernetics, it penetrated deep into the pulsing tubes and electronic ganglia.

There was a pause as if the entire structure were sucking in its breath, and then the top of the dome erupted in a white napalm concussion. The upper four tiers, and any person stationed there, vaporized instantly. As air defense sirens bellowed belatedly in the distance, a series of smaller explosions in the lower levels began to issue thick black smoke.

Miraculously, the substructure containing the human forms remained, for the moment, intact. The frail white-haired man, struggling desperately in the acrid fumes to free his imprisoned subjects, staggered against a chamber and collapsed.

Abandoned by the other attendants, their support systems disastrously interrupted, all the encased figures were showing escalating movement; particularly the main subject, which was becoming frantic, grappling clumsily with its helmet and kicking against the sides of its vessel. Reacting to a more intense electronic burst from the circuitry above, the figure underwent a grand mal convulsion, arched its back and exploded the sides of its container with a powerful thrust of its legs.

Outside the inferno it was the chaos of the dead and dying. Frustrated security patrols held well back beyond the perimeter fence, unable to do anything but watch as the terrible drama played itself out. Over the mournful tremolos of the sirens, the first interceptor jets could be heard arriving overhead, too late to do anything but make wide, futile circles over the stricken installation.

From within a ruptured wall of the building, a struggling, naked, bleeding female form was thrust out onto the ground. The thin white arms that made the deposit hesitated, then quickly withdrew back inside.

Left sprawled in the dust, the abandoned escapee, driven on by the fumes and heat, desperately began to claw and lurch itself forward. It had scarcely dragged itself out of lethal range when the last of the infrastructure gave way and a final explosion atomized the greater part of the installation, hurling the terrified victim violently across the ground. The battered form recovered quickly and immediately resumed its crazed flight. Without apparent knowledge of its direction, it writhed its way onward, unobserved, through the main gate and out into the night.

4

Ben-Gurion apartment complex, Jerusalem, Israel 1:05
A.M
., Saturday, December 25,1999

T
he phone jangled Jonathan Feldman out of the last truly undisturbed sleep he would ever have.

Groping in the dark for the receiver with one hand, his wire-rimmed glasses with the other, he sent a half-eaten bowl of yesterday's cereal tumbling from cluttered night-stand to floor.

He snapped on the light and squinted nearsightedly down at Cheerios and milk sloshing in his Nikes. Swearing profusely, Feldman cradled the phone between ear and shoulder and wrestled on his glasses.

“What?” he croaked, pouring back cereal from shoes to bowl.

“Jon, get over here. Jordan just hit a military installation in the Negev!”

It was the familiar, if unusually excited, voice of Breck Hunter, a videographer and close friend with whom Feldman worked as a World News Network Middle East TV correspondent.

“What?”

“Just about an hour ago. I can see the glow in the sky from here.”

“Jordanians?”

“That's the buzz over the military radio band,” Hunter explained. “Let's get out there.”

At a relatively young thirty years of age, Feldman's crisp reporting style and disarming on-camera presence had already caught the attention of the World News Network hierarchy. It had helped net him this prestigious assignment, his first outside the U.S. Yawning, Feldman pushed up his spectacles, rubbed unfocused, pale gray eyes, and began gathering his resolve. “Okay. See if you can get us clearance. I'll pick you up in five minutes.”

Checking his clock, he was doubly glad he'd left WNN's dull Christmas Eve office party early. But his hopes for tonight's more promising U.S. embassy function, he realized, might now be jeopardized.

Journalistic instincts began taking over.
Why Jordan?
he wondered to himself.
Why would a poorly armed, moderate Arab state risk war with a military power like Israel?
He shoved papers around his desk, searching for his keys.
And wouldn't a surprise attack be more effective over Rosh Hashanah? This is a Jewish state, for chris-sakes. Not exactly Washington at Valley Forge.

He pulled on his sneakers, stopping only long enough to swear at the wetness, grabbed his worn leather jacket from a chair and bolted out the door. Once again, he was thankful he'd slept in his clothes.

Although he'd only been on assignment here a few months, the newsman had come to learn his way around Jerusalem quite well. Firing up his rented all-terrain Land Rover, Feldman hustled away from his downtown apartment complex, heading south. The dust in the streets kicked up in turbulent swirls with his passing, the result of a severe drought that had begun long before his arrival.

He found it fascinating the way the night transformed this strange city. The bright gleaming lights misrepresented Jerusalem's antiquity, and obscured its truth. To the passing eye, the artificial illumination cast shadows, disguising the Holy City as a stable, thriving metropolis. But as Feldman knew, sadly, the reality was otherwise. Beneath Jerusalem's veil lay the ancient origins of three very proud religions with a history of violent opposition to one another. Jew, Christian and Muslim lived grudgingly side by side in segregated sections of the city amid continuing tension and distrust. Locked in an eternal struggle that dated back to before the Crusades, they competed in a three-way ideological tug-of-war over control of the city's sacred shrines.