“Fuck me,” Bainbridge said. “What the hell was that?”
“I’ve no idea,” Albert said. “Come on!”
Leaving the rifle behind, he caught up the AK-47 and started to run down the stairs and out of the back entrance. The building’s owner was nowhere to be seen. Albert pulled a radio transmitter out of his pocket and jammed his finger down on the single button. The devices they’d scattered over Tehran exploded, adding to the chaos. It would take the Iranians some time to realise that no one had been hurt in the explosions, suggesting they’d been nothing more than decoys. By then, Albert wanted to be well away from Tehran.
He glanced towards the square as they ran out onto the streets. The crowd was fleeing, those who could flee. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, had been injured or killed by the second explosion, the one that had destroyed the alien’s body. They had to be nervous about losing a body where it could be examined, Albert told himself. There had been no way to know that the aliens had wired their own bodies to blow in case of death. It didn’t stop the guilt from gnawing at him as they joined the crowd in flight. No one took any notice of their weapons. The policemen and soldiers seemed to be fleeing too.
Behind them, chaos spread as a riot broke out. Albert could hear gunshots, although there was no way of knowing who was being targeted, or why. It sounded as if the religious policemen or the revolutionary guard had turned on the crowd, firing on it to try to maintain order. In return, the crowd was fleeing or turning on the policemen, forcing the soldiers to choose sides. Albert hoped that they would move to protect the people. Perhaps the explosion would mark the end of the Mullah’s rule in Tehran. He allowed himself a quick prayer for the innocents slain in the blast as they reached their safe house and changed clothes. The uniforms they’d stolen should get them out of the city before they could be caught by the authorities. And then they could make their way to the coast and get out on a smuggler’s boat.
An hour later, they were in a stolen knock-off copy of a jeep, driving west from Tehran towards the Gulf. There had been no serious attempt to stop them, or any of the thousands of others fleeing the city as the chaos spilled out of control. Iran’s people had any number of grudges to pay off against the Mullahs and their lackeys — and now they had their chance. They had passed a military convoy heading into the city, but there was no way of knowing what side the soldiers were on, or even if there was a side. Albert had been on the ground during the Arab Spring. He knew that revolutions always had one thing in common. They tended to go round and round.
Bainbridge was fiddling with the radio in the jeep. The Iranian Mullahs had tried to keep their people from hearing news broadcasts from the West — or the rest of the Middle East, for that matter — but there were ways around even the tightest security. Albert knew that the United States had been quietly slipping communications equipment into Iran for years, aiding those with the determination to fight for freedom to coordinate and work together against the state. It was easy to reset the radio to pick up broadcasts from Qatar, even Al Jazeera. The Arab satellite TV channel might have been effectively an enemy broadcast station, but it did have a good track record of picking up reports from the Arab world. It even had a good reputation in Iran.
“…Coming in of a massive explosion in Iran,” the speaker was saying. It was a female voice, something that would have shocked the traditionalists. The fundamentalist terrorists and the United States might not have agreed on much, but disapproving of Al Jazeera was definitely one of them. “Early reports suggest that the alien representative was somehow gunned down in Iran, followed by terrorist bombings…”
The broadcast vanished in a hail of static. “They’ve got a few things right,” Bainbridge commented. “I wonder what else they got right…”
There was a massive flare of light, behind them. Albert acted without thought, braking the jeep to a stop and driving out to hit the deck. Bainbridge followed him, a second before the shockwave passed overhead. The noise hit them next, a thunderous racket that was almost deafening in its intensity. There was only one possible cause, Albert told himself. The aliens had nuked Tehran. They’d killed an entire city for daring to lose one of their people.
He rolled over and stared towards where Tehran had been. A massive cloud was climbing up towards the heavens, already taking on an unmistakable shape and form. It was an ominous grey mushroom, mocking the puny humans below as it loomed above them. Once, Albert had read a story where the watchers had seen a devil’s face in the mushroom cloud. It was suddenly easy to believe the story. He couldn’t escape the thought. The aliens had killed an entire city to avenge the death of one of their people. They’d killed millions of humans to avenge the deaths of one of their people. They’d killed…
Bainbridge put it into words. “My God,” he said. “What have we done?”
It was tempting to think of Iranians as a monolithic entity, to assume that all Iranians were like the terrorists he’d killed, but Albert knew that that was a lie. Innocents, thousands of innocents, had died in the blast. The aliens had finally shown their true nature, all right, and Tehran had paid the price. He wanted to go back and help, but he knew that it would be futile. There was nothing that two Marines, or even the remaining American forces in the Gulf, could do to help.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They passed the remainder of the trip in silence, circling around any large habitation to avoid any possible complications. The radio was nothing, but static; Bainbridge couldn’t tell if the aliens were jamming the signals to make matters worse, or if it was merely a side-effect of the nuke. If it had been a nuke… Albert had his suspicions about that too. The aliens wanted Earth, but presumably they didn’t want to inherit a radioactive ruin. They could simply have dropped a very large rock on Tehran and watched the fireworks from a safe distance.
Once down by the shore, they abandoned the plan to find a smuggler’s boat and settled for stealing a fishing boat from a small village. Heading out into the waters, they hailed an American warship and were picked up by a team of grim-faced SEALs. Albert had met a couple of them while on detached duty, which made identification easier. None of the SEALs looked happy, or even relived to be away from Tehran. Something was badly wrong.
“Haven’t you heard?” One of them said, when Albert finally asked. “The President has collapsed. The Vice President is already being sworn in.”
Chapter Thirty
Washington DC
USA, Day 53
“What the hell happened?”
“It looks like a massive heart attack,” the Doctor said. She looked tired and harassed. The White House medical team were among the best-trained in the world, but they knew that losing their main patient would mean the end of their careers. “We managed to stabilise him here, but we’re going to have to move him to the Naval Hospital as soon as we can. He needs more medical attention than we can provide for him here.”
Toby winced. “Doctor, I hate to sound insensitive, but how long until he can resume his duties?”