The Omega Theory Page 12

  “Hamas!” he screamed. “Hamas! They’re right behind us!”

  The zealots’ reaction was immediate—they threw their prayer books to the ground and grabbed their Uzis. When David was ten feet away he flung himself to the floor and dragged Monique with him, rolling past the zealots’ feet toward the safety of the archway. An instant later, the kippot srugot opened fire.

  The shots thundered in the stone corridor. David and Monique huddled against the blocked-up archway, the fractured, gray wall that had absorbed so many of the zealots’ prayers. Closing his eyes, David added his own plea to the Holy of Holies—God Jesus Lord, help! The juddering gunfire pounded his eardrums.

  Then someone yelled something in Hebrew and the bearded Jews stopped shooting. David opened his eyes and peered down the corridor. Seven bodies, all dressed in black, lay twisted on the floor.

  Miraculously, none of the kippot srugot were hurt. One of them, a curly-haired giant with a rainbow-colored knitted yarmulke, approached David. “Don’t worry, we radioed the army,” he said. Then he pointed at Monique’s right arm. “We told them you’ll need an ambulance.”

  Monique nodded. She was shivering and her lips were bluish. David grew alarmed. He wondered how much blood she’d lost. “Hey, you should lie down,” he said, gently gripping her shoulder and lowering her to the floor. “Take it easy. You’ve earned a rest.”

  She didn’t protest. She lay on the floor and let David put her in the shock position, elevating her legs by placing a stack of prayer books under her heels. When he was done, she let out a long breath. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry? Baby, you don’t have to—”

  “I’m not apologizing to you. I’m apologizing to God.” She shifted her head on the floor and gave him a weak smile. “And to all of His wackos.”

  AS SOON AS THE JEWS STARTED FIRING THEIR UZIS, NICO DOVE BACK INTO the smugglers’ tunnel. He’d been so focused on chasing the Americans, he hadn’t noticed the crowd of Israelis until it was too late. His stomach twisted as he lay on the tunnel’s stinking floor and heard the gunshots in the corridor just a few feet away. His men were being slaughtered, all of them. Including Bashir, his friend and comrade-in-arms, whom he’d known since they were teenagers in the slums of East Beirut.

  For a moment he considered joining them in death, charging down the corridor and trying to kill as many Jews as he could before they cut him down. But when he got to his feet he turned away from the broken plywood board and retraced his steps through the smugglers’ tunnel, running back to the basement of Beit Shalom Yeshiva. If he hurried, he could reach the safety of the Muslim quarter’s alleys before the Israeli police arrived. Then he would go to the safe house and contact Brother Cyrus.

  Nico knew that Cyrus wouldn’t be pleased. But he also knew that the man was relentless. Cyrus would give him new orders, a new plan. And this was the surest way for Nico to get his revenge. One way or another, he would kill the Americans. The Almighty would guide his hand as he slit their throats.

  12

  CAMP COBRA WAS LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS OLD, BUT IN COLONEL BRENT Ramsey’s humble opinion it was already the best damn army base he’d ever seen. More than seven hundred Rangers from the 75th Regiment and two hundred pilots and crewmen from the Eighth and 160th Aviation squadrons were hidden inside a cavern in the Kopet Dag Mountains, just ten miles north of Turkmenistan’s border with Iran.

  Ramsey, a Special Forces man with twenty-two years in the service, stood on the granite floor of the cavern and watched his soldiers unload the trucks that had come from Afghanistan the night before. The cave was close to a Turkmen road that ran across the mountain range, and its mouth was big enough that the Rangers could drive their trucks right inside. Past the entrance, the cave widened enormously, forming a huge natural garage more than two hundred feet across. Dozens of Humvees and flatbed trucks were parked along the cavern’s rocky walls. The loads on the flatbeds were covered with tarp, but Ramsey recognized them by their shapes. Each of the smaller loads was a Black Hawk helicopter. The larger loads were Ospreys, tilt-rotor aircraft that could carry twice as many men as the helicopters and fly nearly twice as fast.

  And that was just the front section of the cave—the foyer, you could say. About sixty yards farther inside, the cavern’s floor sloped down to an even more spacious chamber where the Rangers had erected a tent city. They’d already set up a mess hall and an armory and a field hospital, not to mention the long rows of tents that served as their barracks. Beyond this section, the cavern narrowed a bit and descended to a lower chamber and a crescent-shaped pool of greenish water, an honest-to-goodness underground lake. The water smelled sulfurous and wasn’t exactly potable, but it was geothermally heated to a toasty ninety-five degrees, and some of the soldiers had already swum laps down there.

  Ramsey shook his head as he thought about how goddamn perfect this base was. For one thing, it was only sixty miles north of the Iranian nuclear facility. The Black Hawks and Ospreys could reach their target in less than twenty minutes, which was a hell of lot quicker than flying from Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf. Even better, the whole operation was hidden from view. Although Iran had spy satellites that monitored military activity near the country’s borders, Camp Cobra wasn’t going to appear in any of their images of Turkmenistan. The Iranians wouldn’t see any unusual activity on the Turkmen roads either, because the Rangers had transported everything at night. And Turkmenistan’s president-for-life had sent his secret police to the area and discreetly evacuated all the nearby villages. It was a brilliant plan, and General McNair deserved a hell of a promotion for coming up with it. McNair wasn’t Ramsey’s favorite person in the army—the general was a straitlaced God-and-country type, whereas Ramsey was more of a hell-raiser—but the colonel had to give credit where credit was due. If Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda could hide in caves, then the U.S. Army damn well could, too.

  After a few minutes the soldiers finished unloading the last truck and returned to their tents. Ramsey headed for the mouth of the cave, exchanging salutes with the pair of sentries posted there. McNair had gone back to Afghanistan before daybreak, leaving Ramsey in charge of the base, and now the colonel was going to stretch his legs a bit. Because of the need for secrecy, McNair had ordered everyone to stay in the cave during daylight hours, but he’d positioned a few snipers in well-camouflaged locations on the mountainsides, and Ramsey wanted to see for himself how those boys were doing. It was still early in the morning and the fog was thick in the mountain pass, so there was no chance that any satellite or spy plane would spot him. Besides, the colonel had been on duty for the past twenty-two hours, taking army-issue Dexedrine pills to stay alert, and now he needed a little exercise to calm himself down.

  Outside the cave’s mouth was an arid plateau covered with hard-packed dirt and prickly desert plants. The bare brown ridges of the Kopet Dag loomed all around. Ramsey liked the look of these mountains—they reminded him of his boyhood home in West Texas. The Kopet Dag weren’t particularly high, but they ran straight and true like a long earthen wall, rising above the flat expanse of the Karakum Desert and forming a natural barrier between Turkmenistan and Iran. The Iranian nuclear facility was on the opposite side of the wall, inside a cavern very similar to the one that concealed Camp Cobra. As Ramsey marched across the plateau he turned his gaze in that direction. The mountains blocked his view but he kept looking anyway, feeling as cocky and eager as an eighteen-year-old recruit. Ramsey got this same feeling whenever he prepared for a mission, this powerful sense of anticipation. He knew that they wouldn’t actually launch the surprise attack for at least another two days—in a final diplomatic move, the White House had given the Revolutionary Guards forty-eight hours to voluntarily surrender their nukes, which of course they would never do. But in his mind’s eye Ramsey could already see the assault beginning, the Ospreys and Black Hawks rising from the plateau and racing south to their target.

  Ramsey was so juiced that he walked all the way
across the plateau, a brisk half mile. From this spot he could look directly south through a gap in the mountains. He couldn’t glimpse Iran—the fog at the lower elevations was too thick—but in the foreground he saw a stream threading the mountain pass, flanked by junipers that looked extravagantly green against the brown surroundings. He also heard the unmistakable sound of a waterfall.

  Intrigued, he made a foray down the slope, heading for the sinuous stream. He thought again of his boyhood in Brewster County, all the mornings spent exploring his father’s ranch in the Del Norte Mountains, constantly scanning the ground for rattlesnakes and arrowheads. When Ramsey reached the line of junipers he started searching for the waterfall, following the sound of the plashing stream through a dense tangle of undergrowth. And then he heard someone behind him say, “Stop right there, Colonel.”

  It was an American voice, no foreign accent. Ramsey assumed it was one of his snipers. He raised his hands in the air and turned around, making a joke of it. “Good work, soldier,” he said. “You got me, fair and square.”

  But when he saw the soldier he did a double take. First of all, it wasn’t a man. It was a young woman, quite tall, with ample breasts and a pretty face. She wore a standard-issue army uniform, but there was no unit designation on her shoulder and no name tag on her chest. Most disturbing of all, she was pointing a Heckler & Koch nine-millimeter at his head, and there was a silencer attached to the gun’s barrel. Ramsey stared at her in disbelief. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted, lowering his hands. “Put down that weapon!”

  The woman frowned. “Keep your hands up, Colonel,” she said. “I’m not going to warn you again.”

  Ramsey shook his head. One of the Rangers must’ve brought his goddamn girlfriend along with him. Some horny idiot had snuck this bitch onto last night’s convoy and found her a hiding spot near the base. It was the only explanation that made any sense. The colonel strode toward her. “Goddamn it! I said put down that—”

  She adjusted her aim and fired the nine-millimeter. Ramsey heard a muffled burst and saw his right hand explode. The bullet tore through his knuckles, nearly severing his index and middle fingers. Belatedly, Ramsey’s Special Forces training kicked in. Ignoring the pain that shot up his right arm, he reached with his left hand for the M-9 pistol in his holster. But the woman shifted her aim again and fired at his left hand, tearing a ragged hole in his palm. It was goddamn fucking HUMILIATING—the bitch had disabled him in less than two seconds! Enraged, Ramsey charged at her through the undergrowth, fully expecting her to shoot him again and put him out of his misery, but the bitch just stood there, smiling. Then another soldier came out of nowhere and shoved him to the ground.

  The second soldier was a man at least. Ramsey opened his mouth to curse the bastard, folding his lower lip behind his teeth to shout, “Fuck you!” But then he looked up and saw the bastard’s face. It was McNair. The general loomed over him, tall and gaunt, his bright blue eyes radiating fury.

  Ramsey was confused as hell, and the pain in his hands wasn’t helping any. “General?” he croaked. “I thought you went back to—”

  “My orders were clear, Ramsey.” McNair glowered at him. His mouth was like a minus sign. The bitch with the Heckler & Koch stood to his left. “No one was to leave the cave.”

  “I . . . I’m sorry, sir!” He didn’t know what else to say. “I think I need to go to the field hospital!”

  “No, I’m afraid not.” The general stepped forward. “The Lord has different plans for you now.”

  Then McNair kicked him in the head and Ramsey blacked out.

  13

  IT WAS A PUZZLE, AND MICHAEL LIKED TO SOLVE PUZZLES. AFTER TAMARA showed him the program on the Ultra 27 workstation, he sat in front of the computer the whole night and the following morning, staring at the lines of code for sixteen hours. Then he took a nap. Tamara woke him in the evening and gave him another snack. She said she had to go away for a while to do an important job, but another of Brother Cyrus’s soldiers—Angel, the man with the curved scar on his neck—would take care of him until she got back. An hour later, when the sky was fully dark, Angel led him outside and put him into the cargo hold of a big green truck, along with his computer and desk and the bare mattress.

  For the next ten hours Michael sat in the cargo hold with Angel while the truck bounced on the bumpy roads. But he wasn’t bored. He was still working on the puzzle, which he could do even when the workstation was turned off. The software code was in his mind now, arranged in long lines and vertiginous blocks that he could scroll up and down on the black screen of his eyelids. He wanted to spend every waking second with those lines of instructions, because when he worked on the puzzle he didn’t have to think about Tamara or Brother Cyrus or Dr. Parsons. He could forget where he was and what was going to happen to him and think of nothing but the program.

  At dawn the truck stopped in the middle of a desert. When Angel opened the truck’s rear door, Michael saw sand dunes in every direction, rippling in great beige waves to the horizon. Angel said they were in the Karakum Desert, which stretched for hundreds of miles across the country of Turkmenistan. He helped Michael out of the truck and led him to an encampment that Cyrus’s soldiers had set up amid the dunes. Thirteen round huts were arranged in a loose cluster, and several pickup trucks and Land Cruisers were parked on the sand nearby. The huts looked like giant soup bowls turned upside down. Each was about twelve feet across and eight feet high, with a circular wall made of wooden slats and a domed roof made of felt. Angel called them yurts. He went to one of them and opened the door and led Michael inside. There was no furniture, just a big Turkish carpet spread across the floor. Two other soldiers carried Michael’s mattress and desk into the yurt and began hooking up the Ultra 27 workstation, connecting its power cord to a diesel generator outside.

  After Angel and the other men left, Michael sat on the folding chair in front of the computer screen and resumed working on the puzzle. He stared again at the dense blocks of code, checking each line to make sure he’d memorized it correctly. The keys to understanding the program, he’d discovered, were the equations of the unified field theory. By carefully reading the step-by-step instructions in the code, he’d found that the program performed the same tasks as the laws of physics. One part of the code determined the masses of the elementary particles—the electron, the quark, the neutrino, and so on. Another part calculated the strength of the forces between the particles. Yet another part generated the spacetime manifold, specifying the curvature and topology of the spatial dimensions as well as the direction of time. The program was radically different from conventional software because the data it handled was quantum, not binary; instead of being restricted to either zero or one, each bit could take a tremendous number of values. But the program followed the standard rules of logic, which meant that Michael could make sense of it.

  The code on the screen was incomplete, though. The people who’d written it hadn’t known all the equations of the Einheitliche Feldtheorie, so they couldn’t finish the program. Michael, on the other hand, knew the entire theory, so he was able to fill in the gaps. He didn’t do this work on the screen—his fingers never touched the keyboard. Instead, he extended the memorized code in his head, adding new lines of quantum variables and operators. The process involved some tricky rearrangements, but Michael was good at this. It was no more difficult than piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, and he’d spent many hours doing that when he was younger. By midmorning he could glimpse the outlines of the solution, and by noon he’d filled in the last gaps. He scrolled the finished program in his mind, seeing the blocks of code flash against his eyelids. Now they were all arranged in the correct order.

  He was still double-checking the program when he heard a noise behind him. Someone had unlatched the door to the yurt. Michael expected to see Angel come inside, bringing another bag of potato chips. But when he turned around he saw it was Tamara. She still wore her desert-camouflage uniform, but now there were
wet patches under her armpits. Her pistol rested in the holster on her hip, and in her right hand she held a bottle half filled with brown liquid. “Michael!” she shouted, coming toward his desk. “I’m back!”

  He covered his ears. Her voice was too loud.

  “Oh, sorry!” She raised her hand to her mouth and backed away. “That was stupid. Let me start over.” She went to the other side of the yurt and sat down on his mattress. She set the half-full bottle on the Turkish carpet. “I got carried away. I’m just so glad to see you.”

  Michael waited a few seconds, then lowered his hands. “Where were you?”

  “In the mountains. Southwest of here.” She started fanning her hand in front of her face to cool herself. David Swift had told Michael many times that this was a dumb thing to do. Waving your hand back and forth like that just made you hotter. “I’ve been driving all morning. Took me five hours to go a hundred and fifty miles. The roads in this country are awful.”

  “You have a car?”

  She nodded. “It’s one of Brother Cyrus’s cars. A Land Cruiser. Pretty good for off-road driving in the dunes. When I was younger I used to love to go off-roading.”

  “If you have a car, I want you to take me back to David Swift. I already told you his telephone number. It’s 212-555-3988.”

  Tamara said nothing at first. Then she stood up and approached Michael’s desk again. She pointed at the computer screen. “Still working on the puzzle? Have you made any progress?”

  Michael sank lower in his chair. Tamara bent over him, but he refused to look at her.

  “Don’t be afraid, Michael.” Her voice was quiet now. “You’re doing a good thing, a wonderful thing. Remember what I told you? About the Kingdom of Heaven?”

  He shook his head. “There’s nothing in the code about heaven. It’s just a simulation. The program simulates the laws of physics.”