the Second Horseman (2006) (33 page)

"You expect a whole country to just pack up and leave? That's your plan?"

He shrugged. "Of course, many people will choose to stay for whatever reason, and they'll be killed. But that is their decision, not mine. And as a practical matter, they will be the most fanatical and, therefore, the most . . . expendable."

"Didn't Hitler say something like that when he got started?"

"Oh, come now, Richard. Hitler used millions of peaceful Jews as a tool to rally his people into a vicious war. Do you really think that's a good analogy? I'm simply relocating millions of Jews who are threatening the entire planet's stability."

"Relocating? Jesus, Edwin. To where?"

"I imagine that most will be absorbed back into the countries they came from."

Hamdi's outward appearance suggested little but resolute calm. He had obviously convinced himself that he was the impartial architect of the only possible solution. But Scanlon knew that was bullshit. No one was impartial.

"And why were there so many Jews in other countries, Edwin? Because they had been driven out by the persecution of the Arabs. What's next for you? Are you going to nuke the Midwest and give it back to the Indians?"

Hamdi smiled humorlessly. "The Jews will be reabsorbed by the Western world, and the Palestinians, with a bit of coaxing, will be absorbed by the Arab world. And with that, a problem that we both know was going to end in disaster will simply cease to exist. The West Wall, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and everything else will be gone. The land that gave rise to the disastrous myth of God will be a wasteland of irradiated sand. An
d b
ecause this was done by a Muslim terrorist organization, the Arabs will see it as a victory despite the hardship it will pile on them. They always do. As for the Jews, they will no longer have a Holy Land to kill for, and they'll busy themselves building new enclaves from which to practice their particular brand of racism."

"So your solution to disputes between people is to destroy the thing they're arguing about? That's a great plan, Edwin. Think how many neat little solutions you could come up with if you just had a hundred more warheads? You could get started right away on Tibet. And what about Kashmir? Of course, there wouldn't be much of the world left after you were done."

"Perhaps not," Hamdi said seriously. "Or maybe people would learn to create equitable solutions to those disputes in the face of the alternative."

"Amazing how well behaved people can be when you have a gun pressed against their temple."

"Don't be so melodramatic, Richard. It doesn't suit you. You act as though I made this decision yesterday based on an article in the newspaper. I've personally worked to broker peace between the Jews and the Palestinians. I've studied and written on th
e s
ubject for most of my life. I've tried to direct America's policies --"

"And it's working! You've completely changed the administration's stance toward the issue. You're --"

"Too little, too late, Richard. I fought tirelessly for years and have managed to change a few insignificant policies, but not the attitudes that created them. What is the likelihood that the next administration will continue pushing in a direction that's at odds with what most Americans believe?"

"If they see that --"

"No. The problem with Americans is that they always want to force the fantasy of who they are on everyone else. They say that we can succeed in the Middle East by appealing to the moderates -- a strategy that doesn't even work in U
. S
. elections. We believe we are the only truly moral country, despite incredible murder and crime rates, the fact that we produce virtually all of the world's pornography, and consume most of its narcotics. We say that al-Qaeda are horrible terrorists because they killed thirty-five hundred people on September eleventh, but consider ourselves peace-loving when we kill and torture tens of thousands in Iraq. We demand democracy and then are surprised when, just like in America, religious fundamentalists are elected. The stage is set for endless fighting, Richard. You know this."

"So kill them all and let God sort them out? That's your solution?"

"The time for compromise and half solutions is over, Richard. The stakes are too high."

Scanlon pulled hard on his cuffs, nearly toppling the chair and feeling the bones in his wrists strained almost to the point of breaking. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have allowed this to happen? He wrenched his hands forward again, this time feeling the skin beneath the metal shackles split. Finally, he went still, his head hanging and warm blood dripping from his fingertips.

"Eventually, the oil will run out," Hamdi said. "And the Middle East will collapse back in on itself. The question is what will happen in the meantime? This is a giant step in the direction of controlling the region without killing millions of Arabs and turning America into a security-obsessed totalitarian state."

Scanlon heard a desk drawer open and looked up to watch Hamdi pull a gun from it.

"It won't surprise you to know that I'v
e n
ever killed anyone," he said. "I was going to have one of my men do it but again it seemed like an insult. I have a great deal of respect for you, Richard. In fact, I consider you a friend."

Scanlon stared at the black silencer extending from the gun's barrel but didn't bother pulling against the handcuffs again. There was no point. It was over. He'd killed Catherine, Brandon, and now how many others? A million? Two?

Had it all been arrogance? Had he gotten involved in this to prove that he was smarter than the men he'd left behind in the government? Had he been blinded by that?

"You'll understand if I don't take a lot of comfort from your friendship, Edwin."

Chapter
FORTY-ONE

"Shit."

Brandon continued to lean on Catherine for support, though the effects of the blow to his head had dissipated enough that he could stand on his own. They both stood completely still, focusing first on the armed men screaming at them in Arabic, then on the warheads.

Brandon didn't speak the language, but the meaning was fairly clear. He raised his hands and shuffled along behind Catherine, who was being dragged toward the door by her hair.

The sun was hot overhead, and Brandon shaded his eyes as he jumped down to the sandy strip that passed for a runway. There appeared to be twelve men total, not including their pilot, who was quietly speaking to a guy who had the air of being in charge. Everyone was wearing desert fatigues and most were armed either with a shoulder
-
slung rifle or a holstered pistol. To their left were twelve parked vehicles -- everything from little economy cars to Mercedes to army trucks. Other than that, nothing. Blinding sun, sand, and sky.

Brandon shook his head in disbelief. He'd actually been overly optimistic in his prediction that he'd be dropped off, shot, and buried in an unmarked grave. Who would have guessed?

Catherine was about ten feet away, struggling against a dusty-looking man with one hand tangled in her hair and the other wrapped around a rifle. He was laughing, holding her head at waist level and jerking back and forth as she tried uselessly to free herself. The man guarding Brandon was more cautious, standing back a bit and aiming his rifle directly at Brandon's head.

"Let go!" Catherine shouted, and gave one last jerk backward. The man did as she asked, with timing calculated to send her toppling into a group of broken rocks.

"You okay?" Brandon said, prompting the man next to him to push the barrel of his rifle a little closer.

"What the hell is going on?" she said, slamming a hand down on the ground and raising a small cloud of dust. "Where are we?"

"Not on some tropical island waiting for the navy," Brandon said.

"You don't sound very surprised. Did you have something to do --"

"Come on, Catherine. Get real. Somebody screwed us. This would be an example of why you don't get involved in shit that doesn't concern you."

The man hovering over her shouted an unintelligible order and seemed a bit perplexed when she ignored him.

"So what are you trying to say, Brandon? That Richard's sold us out to --," she pointed at the man hovering over her. "To him? No way."

"And yet here we are," Brandon said. "Take it from me. Loyalties can get a little murky when numbers get into the nine digits."

"Bullshit!"

She was an odd sight sitting there in the rocks with her hair in her face and still wearing the heavy parka she'd had on in the plane. He was still wearing his, too, and he could feel the sweat starting to run down his sides.

"This isn't going to happen," she shouted. "There's no way I'm going to allow this to happen!"

Brandon let out a long breath, but otherwise remained motionless in deference to the man aiming a gun at him. He didn't want this, either. He didn't want to die. He didn't want to watch her die -- or worse. And he sure as hell didn't want to see these psychos drive off with twelve nuclear weapons in the back of their cars. But what could he do? The truth was that he was completely out of his depth. How stupid had he been to agree to do this? What had he been thinking?

The man guarding Catherine was yelling again, apparently wanting his new toy to stand. Incredibly, she continued to completely ignore him.

"What do we do, Brandon?"

He looked along the barrel of the rifle aimed at him and into the eyes of the man at the other end. Like the man hovering over Catherine, he was registering their conversation, but clearly he didn't understand any of it. And their compatriots were all busy unloading the plane under the watchful eye of that scumbag, double-crossing pilot.

Brandon had to raise his voice to be heard over the man still shouting at Catherine. "I'm not Danny. I don't know what to do."

"I assume you agree that we're going to be dead in an hour."

"I guess."

"Then if I were to do something stupid, you wouldn't have a problem with that."

He didn't answer immediately. He was a person who needed time to think, to plan. To consider every contingency. Now she was asking him to make life-or-death decisions without so much as a coin toss. "I don't know," he said finally. "Are we talking just dumb, or really moronic?"

The man standing over Catherine was screaming now, obviously losing a fair amount of face by being defied by an unarmed woman. She looked up at him, took a deep breath, and screamed back. "Would you shut the fuck up? I can't hear myself think!"

That was the last straw. The man switched his rifle to his left hand and grabbed hold of Catherine's arm. She offered some token resistance but in the end let him get a good grip and start pulling.

Brandon was the only one who seemed to notice that she wasn't letting go of the softball-sized rock her hand was resting on. She allowed herself to be yanked upward, adding to the momentum of the rock that was already moving in a smooth arc toward the man's head. Oddly, he didn't even flinch. Thousands of years of women cowering at the feet of his ancestors had left hi
m u
nable to process even the possibility of this attack.

Brandon's relationship with women had been a little less one-sided, and he shifted his attention to the gun aimed at him.

The crack of stone against skull prompted the man in front of him to hesitantly adjust his aim toward Catherine.

Brandon charged, ducking low and driving upward with his legs, trying to lift him off the ground and dump him on his back.

It turned out not to be as easy as the jocks at his high school had made it look. While the man's feet did briefly leave the ground, when they came back down they were still under him. The blow to Brandon's back felt like it came from the butt of the rifle, and though it mostly just glanced off, it was enough to send him sprawling facedown in the dirt. Every muscle in his body seized when he heard the brief burst of automatic gunfire, and then he went completely slack. So this was where it was going to end. Bleeding to death in the middle of --

"Brandon! Get up!" Another short burst of fire. Then another.

He turned his face out of the sand and opened his eyes only to find himself staring at the bleeding body of the man who had been guarding him.

"For God's sake, Brandon! Get up!" Catherine shouted again. She sounded farther away this time.

It took another few seconds for him to realize that he hadn't been shot. He was alive. In fact, other than a little sand in his mouth, he felt fine.

A sharp burst of adrenaline dissipated the lingering effects of his brief death and he wrestled the rifle from the dead man's hands. Instead of standing, though, he rolled into a position that allowed him to aim the gun in the direction of the plane.

Amazingly there was another man down near the landing gear and three more scrambling for cover. Catherine was moving sideways at an oddly casual pace, inching toward the line of parked cars while peering intently through her rifle's sights. She seemed to have figured out how to switch it to semiautomatic and was delivering extremely accurate fire in the direction of anyone who exposed even a few inches of skin.

Brandon used the faint glimmer of hope he felt to force himself to his feet and start a stumbling sprint toward the vehicles Catherine was so methodically closing in on.