The Omega Theory (35 page)

Monique raised her head. She’d wiped the tears from her cheeks. “The Turkmen Army is cooperating with the soldiers who attacked us. Whoever’s in charge of the operation must’ve—”

“His name is Brother Cyrus,” Michael said. “I was in his camp near Darvaza.”

Monique stared at him. “Brother Cyrus? Is that his real name?”

“That’s what his soldiers call him. He wears a head scarf over his face.”

Very gently, Monique grasped his shoulder. “This is important. Michael. How many soldiers does he have?”

Michael closed his eyes and searched his memory. “I counted a total of fifty-two soldiers in the camp. Twenty-five of them wore Special Operations insignia. I also saw seven Land Cruisers, six Tundra pickups, and four Kamaz trucks.”

“What else? Did this Brother Cyrus have something called Excalibur? Did he ever mention that name, Michael?”

He turned away from her. He remembered the name. “He said he was going to unsheathe Excalibur. He said the code would tell them how to aim God’s sword at the weakest part of this broken world.”

“What did he mean by ‘the code’? Did he mean a program?”

Michael nodded. His eyes stung, and now he felt hot tears on his cheeks. “I broke my promise. I told him the code.”

“And this program embodies the laws of physics?” Her voice was softer now, no more than a whisper. “And shows how to remake the universe?”

His tears blurred his vision. Monique’s face shifted and dissolved. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! It’s my fault! I’m sorry!”

Monique pulled him close and hugged him again. Crying hard, he rested his forehead in the crook of her neck. Until it actually happened, he didn’t think Monique would forgive him. How could you forgive someone for killing the world? But she wouldn’t be holding him right now, he thought, if she’d hadn’t forgiven him.

He sat there for almost a minute while Monique patted and rubbed his back, making circular “there, there” motions. Finally she said, “It’s all right, Michael. We’re going to sort this out.” Then she turned to Olam. “Should we contact the Americans in Afghanistan?” she asked. “This helicopter has a radio, doesn’t it?”

“And what will we tell them?” Olam’s brow wrinkled below his skullcap. “That a man named Brother Cyrus is planning to crash the universe? Even if they believed us, they couldn’t act fast enough. First they’d start their own investigation. Then they’d send diplomatic cables to the Turkmen president. Then they’d wait for him to reply.” He shook his head. “No, it’s too late for that. Cyrus is ready to strike.”

“Well, what can we do about it? We don’t know where he is!”

Olam pulled another sheet of paper from his pocket. “We know that the convoy of Land Cruisers headed southeast from Yangykala Canyon.” He unfolded the paper and tapped the top left corner. “We could fly back there and try to retrace the convoy’s route.”

Monique leaned forward to look at the paper, and so did Michael. It was a map of Turkmenistan. The country was shaped like a shoe, with the heel and sole pressing down on Iran and the toe digging into Afghanistan. And in the part of the sole where it arched most sharply, Michael saw a familiar name. He pointed at it. “Kuruzhdey,” he said.

“What?” Monique looked at him. “Did you say something, Michael?”

“Kuruzhdey,” he repeated. “That’s where Angel said Brother Cyrus’s trucks were going.”

Olam brought the map closer to his face. Then he spun around and said something in Hebrew to his men. Two of the soldiers dashed out of the helicopter and raced across the dunes to the other MI-8. Another two men rushed forward to the cockpit and began flipping switches on the control panels. In a few seconds Michael heard the whine of the helicopter’s turboshaft engines.

Olam looked over his shoulder as he stepped into the cockpit. “It’s two hundred fifty kilometers away,” he said. “We’ll be there in an hour.”

34

BROTHER CYRUS DEPARTED FROM CAMP COBRA BY WAY OF THE BACKDOOR
tunnel that bypassed the main entrance. Nicodemus and most of the other True Believers went with him, shining their flashlights on the tunnel’s rocky walls. Cyrus had left a dozen men behind to guard the tent that held Little Boy. These holy martyrs would remain in the cavern’s lower chamber to make sure that no one interfered with the nuclear device. It was probably an unnecessary precaution; none of the Rangers in the camp knew about the bomb, and General McNair had already ordered his men to stay away from the tent. But the Lord, Cyrus knew, always rewarded the prudent. McNair would also stay behind in Camp Cobra while Cyrus and his followers crossed into Iran. Little Boy’s detonator was set to go off at two o’clock, which gave them nearly an hour to get clear.

Cyrus’s knees ached as he climbed the dark, narrow path. It would’ve been more comfortable to leave the cavern by the main entrance, passing the long rows of tents in the upper chamber and the dozens of aircraft parked just inside the cave’s mouth. But he couldn’t walk through Camp Cobra wearing his head scarf, and if he went unmasked one of the Rangers might recognize him. Although Adam Cyrus Bennett was a civilian, he was well known in the U.S. Army. He’d started his career in 1969 as a researcher at the Livermore lab, where he’d learned about nuclear warheads and X-ray lasers. When the cold war ended he became a director at DARPA, in charge of awarding Defense Department grants to researchers developing new military technologies. For the next twelve years he was a dedicated civil servant, frequently visiting the front lines to field-test new weapons and determine what the soldiers needed. It was during one of those visits, a trip to eastern Afghanistan in 2004, that the Taliban ambushed his army escorts and took him to the cave in Gazarak Mountain. Then Adam Cyrus Bennett saw the Lord’s face and realized that he’d been serving the wrong master.

After McNair’s troops rescued him, he was flown back to Washington and spent the next three months recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The doctors said he made a remarkable recovery, especially considering the severity of his wounds. After another month of rest, he returned to his office at DARPA and his job of sustaining America’s military superiority. By that point, however, he wasn’t Adam Cyrus Bennett anymore. Satan’s foot soldiers had torn his spirit from his body, yanking his corrupted soul through the carvings they’d made in his chest and back and crotch. But the Lord, in His infinite wisdom, had filled his body with a new spirit. He was Brother Cyrus now, God’s humble servant. “Adam Cyrus Bennett” was nothing more than a disguise, a way to secretly fulfill the Lord’s plans.

And it was a good disguise, ideally suited for his new mission. Every year Cyrus’s office distributed $500 million of research grants. About a third of the funding came from the Pentagon’s classified “black budget.” Because the Defense Department didn’t have to disclose the details of these appropriations, it was easy for Cyrus to secretly funnel a sizable amount to the Redemption. He’d used the classified funds to hire experts to study the intelligence reports about the unified field theory. The black budget had also financed the clandestine activities of the True Believers—the fleet of trucks and Land Cruisers, the camp in the Turkmen desert—as well as the theft of the enriched uranium from the reactor in Kazakhstan. Cyrus had used another chunk of money to establish Logos Enterprises, the shell company that whisked Excalibur out of the Livermore lab. And he’d spent $10 million on the construction of Jacob Steele’s Caduceus Array.

This was the trickiest part of the operation. Jacob had come to DARPA with the proposal of building single-ion clocks to prove the computational nature of spacetime. Cyrus saw right away that such an instrument would be useful to his cause. By measuring the fleeting time disruptions caused by the Excalibur test in Iran, the Caduceus Array would show whether the laser could really trigger the Redemption. Keeping his true purpose a secret, Cyrus allowed Jacob to divert his DARPA grant to the experiment. After the Iranian nuclear test, Cyrus’s men went to Jacob’s lab and downloaded the data on the disruptions, then blew up the place to destroy the evidence. But the reclusive physicist had a secret of his own—from the very beginning Jacob had refused to reveal the name of his Israeli collaborator. Cyrus ultimately sent one of the True Believers to pry the information from him, but Jacob said nothing even when Lukas held a nine-millimeter pistol to his head. Fortunately, Cyrus had a few clues to the Israeli’s identity, which he passed on to Special Agent Lucille Parker when she came to investigate the lab explosion. He knew she could locate the mysterious Olam ben Z’man. And when she did find him, Cyrus arranged the ambush in Yangykala Canyon to eliminate the threat.

As he looked back on it now, Cyrus couldn’t help but marvel at his success. He felt no personal pride, however; all the credit belonged to the Lord, who’d blessed him with so many ardent followers. General McNair was the first, and Cyrus soon found others who hated the corrupt world and yearned for God’s kingdom. He and McNair focused their efforts on their colleagues in the Defense Department, recruiting two more general officers and several dozen lower-ranking soldiers. These True Believers were all too familiar with the world’s corruption, having seen it firsthand in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their souls had been lacerated by war and its atrocities. Before meeting Cyrus, many of the soldiers had contemplated suicide. But once they realized that Cyrus could extinguish the evil and open the gates to heaven—a
real
heaven, not some childish fantasy—they pledged themselves to the Lord. At the same time, Cyrus assembled his network of paid informants, using the DARPA funds to infiltrate government agencies in the United States and Israel. In addition to providing valuable intelligence, these informants helped Cyrus shield his operation from the scrutiny of federal bureaucrats and inspectors.

The only difficulty, Cyrus discovered, was a personal one: as his efforts accelerated, he grew more and more impatient. He was so eager to enter the Kingdom of Heaven that he began to loathe his old life and his repellent body. Every time he looked in the mirror he thought of the Book of Joshua, chapter seven, verse thirteen:
There is an accursed thing in the midst of thee.
Cyrus started to wear a head scarf when he was with his True Believers, and soon his self-loathing grew so intense that he wore the scarf even when he was alone. The corruption of the universe was written on his face, and he longed to be rid of it.

Now, after several minutes of hard climbing, Cyrus glimpsed the mouth of the backdoor tunnel. Nicodemus and a few other soldiers rushed ahead, cradling their rifles, just in case there were any enemies standing outside. The True Believers quickly secured the area and Cyrus stepped into the sunlight. Its rays warmed the fabric of his head scarf, which he’d donned again after praying with David Swift. Turning around, he gazed at the mountain from which he’d just emerged, and in his mind’s eye he pictured the 960 solders inside the cavern, ignorant of what awaited them. Cyrus’s eyes filled with tears—all those marvelous young men, so steadfast and trusting! He imagined the soldiers looking at him as if he were their father, and Cyrus—who had no children of his own—was overwhelmed with love.

He wished he could take the men aside and rejoice in the wonder of their sacrifice. With one grand gesture they would erase all their sins. The light of God’s love would flash through the cavern, and thunder would echo in the bowels of the earth. Satan’s minions in America and Russia and China would see the flash and hear the thunder, but they wouldn’t recognize God’s hand. Steeped in darkness, the leaders of the corrupt world would see only death. The president, the most powerful leader of them all, would respond by hurling more death at his foes. But his warhead would strike Excalibur, God’s mighty sword, buried at the foot of an Iranian mountain. And Excalibur would resurrect the universe, turning death into life eternal.

Cyrus and his True Believers turned left, heading for the wide plateau that lay in front of the cavern’s main entrance. After two minutes they came close enough to see the pair of CV-22 Ospreys that had just been rolled out of the cave’s mouth. McNair’s soldiers had unfolded the wings of the aircraft and rotated the tilt rotors to their vertical takeoff positions. Under the original plans for Operation Cobra, the tilt-rotor aircraft were supposed to spearhead the Ranger assault on the Iranian nuclear facility in Ashkhaneh. But that attack would never happen, of course. The assault wasn’t scheduled to begin until well after nightfall, whereas Little Boy would detonate in just fifty-two minutes.

The soldiers who’d fueled and prepared the Ospreys had already returned to the cave. Cyrus didn’t need any aviators from the Special Forces to fly the craft; he had his own pilots and navigators. But a lone man came toward them, a tall, gaunt soldier in a combat uniform with three black stars arranged in a vertical line below the collar. It was Lieutenant General Sam McNair. He spread his arms.

“I came to see you off, Brother,” he said. “And wish you Godspeed.”

The general seemed much cheerier now than the last time he and Cyrus had talked. He doesn’t have to worry anymore, Cyrus thought. Even if McNair’s superiors at Central Command discovered what he was doing, they couldn’t stop him now. There wasn’t enough time. “Thank you for readying the aircraft,” Cyrus said. “How did you explain the situation to your soldiers?”

“I told them that Operation Cobra was canceled because the Iranians had agreed to surrender their nukes. It’s a fairly preposterous lie, but my men accepted it.” He pointed at the Ospreys. “They believe these aircraft will transport a special delegation to the Ashkhaneh facility to supervise the destruction of the Iranian nuclear devices. Again, it’s not the most believable story, but we only need to buy a little more time.”

“And what happens when the Pentagon’s airborne radar detects the Ospreys flying into Iran? Have you prepared for that possibility?”

“Yes, Brother. I’ve shut down all communications in and out of the cavern. I’ve told my men we need to stay inside and go radio dark for the next hour.”

Cyrus nodded, satisfied. McNair had done his job well. Not only had he finalized the arrangements at Camp Cobra, but he’d prepared Cyrus for the last stage of his journey. Because each Osprey held up to thirty-two soldiers, Cyrus could take all his True Believers with him to Ashkhaneh and still have room left over for the Russian X-ray laser. Flying across the border wouldn’t be a problem either, because the Iranians were expecting them—Cyrus had promised the Revolutionary Guards another shipment of U-235. And the flight would take less than half an hour, so they should reach the Ashkhaneh facility just before Little Boy went off. The plan was perfect, he thought. Just as the Lord had promised.