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Dark Passage

By: Adrian Leverkuhn



The White House

"My Fellow Americans," the President of the United States of America began his televised address to the country, "since September 11th, 2001, Christians and Jews around the world have lived under the threat of annihilation by Islamic extremists bent on global domination. These terrorists, while certainly not representative of the main currents in Islamic teachings, have nevertheless managed to expand their ideology of hatred to vast segments of the global population. Despite America's intervention in Iraq in the name of peace, despite America's attempt to spread democratic principles of governance to long-repressed peoples in the Middle East, this radical current within Islam has in the years since 9/11 orchestrated numerous attacks on western cities, including Madrid, London, and Helsinki, and the virulence of the movement has only increased of late to heretofore unforeseen levels. Then last week, the world watched in horror when for the third time in human history a nuclear weapon was used against a civilian population, and Copenhagen was reduced to charred rubble. And while no one nation has claimed responsibility for this attack, it is clear that this action was precipitated by these same radical Islamic terrorists, only now with the support of Islamic republics who have secretly been developing nuclear weapons for some time. Intelligence agencies in both America and western Europe have delivered proof of this assertion to both myself and the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Of this than should be no doubt in your mind.

"It now seems clear to most freedom loving people around the world that radical Islam is a movement that cannot be stopped by conventional means, and that unconventional means of deterring future aggression must be attempted if the people of the world are to live in peace. When attempting to even conceive of new methods of deterrence, military planners in the Pentagon thought it best to analyze successful periods of deterrence in history, and it was concluded that the most recent past held the most completely successful example of deterring a well armed aggressor from pursuing a deadly course of action. This example is the Cold War, and the deterrent policy that best worked was what was known then as Mutually Assured Destruction.

"Just by way of giving you a little background, Mutually Assured Destruction was a policy that at it's most basic level insured that any aggressor-nation attacking the United States would itself be annihilated. This created a "Balance of Terror", whereby no nation dared attack the United States for fear of certain retaliation from America's strategic nuclear forces then arrayed around the world. This policy, developed by John Foster Dulles, grew out of George Kennan's policy of Containment, first implemented in document NSC-68, said document which sought to counter communist expansion by using conventional ground and air forces against Soviet sponsored aggression and expansion against peaceful citizens in first South Korea, then Vietnam, Honduras, Nicaragua, and finally, Afghanistan. The Soviet Union never attempted to use nuclear weapons in these conflicts for fear of invoking the policy response of Mutually Assured Destruction, and from 1945 through 1989 the world lived in relative peace.

"When confronting fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, military planners here and in Europe confronted once again the basic problem of trying to contain this or any terrorist movement; that terrorist organizations are loosely structured movements and not nation states, neither are they identifiable through open alliance with any one government or group of governments. But that is not to say that these movements operate without support from easily identifiable governments, indeed, without support from many governments which claim to support democratic principles in general and the America people in particular. This duplicity has made prosecuting the war on terror an almost impossible political task, and the United Nations, an organization established to contain conflicts of this nature, has been wholly ineffectual in this regard. Our adversaries laugh at our impotence . . .

"Now, freedom loving peoples in the Americas and Europe have been confronted with a new reality, the reality of living under the specter of nuclear intimidation and annihilation.

"My Fellow Americans, let me assure you that from tonight on we will no longer tolerate this state of affairs.

"To that end, from tonight on, our recently augmented and expanded force of B-2 strategic bombers will operate around the clock circling anywhere from two to five cities in the Islamic world. Each of these aircraft will be armed with two of our new third generation five-hundred gigaton hydrogen warheads - the most powerful nuclear devices ever constructed by man. In the event that Islamic terrorists and their sponsor governments in the Islamic world decide to further prosecute their reign of terror on freedom loving peoples anywhere in the world, they should understand that the consequences of their actions will be simply this: within one half hour of a major terrorist attack on any city or military facility of the United States or the European Union, a major city in the Islamic world will be utterly and completely destroyed.

"Joining me now is Major-General Ernst Bayer of the United States Air Force. General, could you please describe for the people listening tonight just where you are, and what your mission is?"

[if you were watching television that evening, your screen split to show the President in the Oval Office on one half of your display and what was obviously the darkened cockpit of an airplane, a helmeted figure dimly seen in silhouette against banks of glowing red and green flight instruments, on the other half . . . ]

"Ah, yes, Mr President, we are currently above the Holy City of Mecca, orbiting at very high altitude, and we will remain on station here for approximately eight hours before we return to base. We are armed with two Mark 98 hydrogen weapons, and will deploy these weapons on authenticated signal from National Command Authority."

"General Bayer, can you tell me what your orders are if your aircraft is fired upon by ground forces below you?"

"Yes, Mr President. If either on-board instruments or our local AWACs aircraft detect the launch of a surface to air missile aimed at either our aircraft or the AWACs aircraft, both of the nuclear weapons on board this aircraft will be armed and deployed on the target, sir."

"Thank you, General. And now my fellow Americans, I would like you to hear from Colonel Deke Hayward. Colonel Hayward, are you there?"

[. . . your television screen flickers for a moment, then resolves on a scene similar to the one it has just replaced, only the figure is more clearly illuminated. You see a handsome middle aged man behind the controls of an aircraft . . .]

"Yes, Mr President, read you loud and clear."

"Colonel, would you please describe for us just where you are tonight, and please state clearly what your operational orders are."

"Well, uh, wait one, ah, yes, Mr President, we are currently above the city of Tehran, over the Islamic Republic of Iran, orbiting at a classified altitude, and we will remain on station here for approximately seven more hours before we return to base. We are armed with two hydrogen weapons, and will deploy these weapons on authenticated signal from National Command Authority or if we are fired upon by hostile forces."

"And again, Colonel, let me be clear here, if fired upon by any force you will without hesitation arm and deploy your nuclear weapons, is that correct?"

"Yes, Mr President."

"Thank you, Colonel Hayward. God bless you."

[. . . your television screen returns to the President in the Oval Office. . . ]

"My Fellow Americans, indeed, to everyone listening to me this night, let me assure you that this policy has been implemented only in the desire that rational thought and sanity will return to discourse among nations, that conflict between peoples and ideas can be resolved without resort of force or intimidation, and that all of the people in the world can unite to confront the huge problems facing our way of life and, indeed, our very world.

"I would like to restate again very clearly; an attack on the United States or any of our military bases around the world will bring swift and final retaliation on a random city in the Islamic world; an attack on any of our allies in the European Union or Israel - or their military facilities - will bring swift and final retaliation; and here I must add that if any attack is carried out against the capital of the United States of America here in Washington, D.C., the full retaliatory power of the United States will be deployed against all population centers in the Islamic world, and the religion that was Islam will simply cease to exist.

"I appreciate your listening to this address, and God Bless America."

RAF Mendenhall Air Force Base

U S Air Force Media Affairs Center

The pale green room in the visitor's center was large and brightly lighted, but a pall of tobacco smoke hung in the air just beneath dingy beige tar-stained ceiling tiles. The cloud hovered over the room below with what could easily have been mistaken for latent malevolence. The room was full of smartly dressed men and women; everyone was scrambling around the increasingly crowded room setting up cameras and microphones, checking sight angles and doing sound-checks. Stylishly dressed men and women stood before video cameras, microphones in hand, and in hushed tone tinged with awe they all described the scene and the import of what was going to be said to the world in the next few minutes.

Colonel Deke Hayward looked at the room full of reporters, the conference room flooded with intense light - the dense splintered strata of light and smoke and dust hovering over the reporters heads, and he shook his head with a mixture of amused disgust and boredom painted on his forty-something year old care-worn face. He looked at the assembled mob of reporters, the camera operators with their microphones trained on the podium where a brace of NATO Generals and Air Marshals would soon gather to outline the logistics behind the President's address to the world the night before. Hayward watched the reporters for a moment more, then turned his attention to the Air Force public relations Captain who chattered incessantly but who - really - seemed to say very little.

"And then, Colonel," the woman said, "after Air Marshall Lake concludes his introductory remarks, he'll introduce you to the cameras. I want you to just move out to the podium and fix your eyes on the Tele-prompter. Just look right into it, the text will scroll along, and read the prepared text. A lot of what you're talking about will be augmented by video presentations on the screens behind you, so don't be distracted by cameras moving from you to the wall behind you, just keep on talking - read the statement. I want you to get through these remarks pretty fast, then tell the reporters that you'd be happy to answer a few of their questions. We'll leave you out there for about five minutes or so, and remember, keep your answers short and don't elaborate, and if you feel uncomfortable with any question just say so and move on to the next reporter. Clear?"

"Yes, Captain, I think I handle that," Hayward said, his voice barely containing the sarcasm that roiled beneath his ironic smile. He turned again to look out at the room full of reporters. His eyes wandered the room, looking for threats to avoid or a friendly face to latch onto, but then his senses screamed and his eyes stopped searching. She was pale, her strawberry blond hair was cool and radiant, and he could just make out those famous green eyes set amidst fields of pale freckles.

"Oh crap!" the PR woman said. "Looks like the BBC sent one of their big guns tonight. You see her?"

"Who, what are you talking about?"

"The redhead you're staring at, Colonel Hayward. Stuart, Angela Stuart is her name. She's the ace reporter for BBC One. She's the closest thing the Brits have to a celebrity newsie. If she's here you can bet this will be the lead story for the BBC World Service tonight, so try not to fuck this up, OK, Colonel Hayward?"

Hayward turned to look down at the short, squat figured Air Force Captain that stood beside him, and he tried but could barely keep his contempt in check. He watched the captain for a moment, watched her wither under the impact of his contemptuous stare, then turned back to look at the BBC reporter.

She was about twenty feet away, walking toward the front ranks of the assembled reporters, and Hayward watched as men and women parted and gave way as she made her way to the camera crew that was set up and waiting for her. A technician hurriedly hooked up an earpiece to the reporter and said a few words into a small microphone, then moved off. Hayward watched the woman for a few more moments, then flinched with a start as the lights dimmed in the room and the podium lights increased to an almost blinding intensity. He watched as RAF Air Marshal Sir Gregory Lake moved to the podium and addressed the reporters in crisp, precise language. Lake recounted the high points of the Presidents address and went over the logistics of the operation that would be carried out primarily from British soil. He began to wind down his part of the presentation, and though he seemed to enjoy this moment in the spotlight, it was apparent to Hayward that the Air Marshal was conscious of this moment in History, conscious of the tremendous forces coiled around his words, waiting for release. The reporters seemed to pick this up, too.

"As you know, operations of this nature exact a tremendous toll on men and machines," the Air Marshall stated, "and operational conditions for these missions will be incredibly stressful on the air crews assigned to Operation Resurgent Glory. Keeping anywhere from three to five B-2 bombers on station 24/7 for the indefinite future - well, there is no operational precedent for this level of sustained operational readiness since the 1960s. The president has assurances that 25 additional B-2 bombers will be delivered within 12 months time, and it is possible that several B-52 bombers from Diego Garcia will augment the force from time to time, but for the next year the stress on these machines will be incredible. Here to talk to you tonight about these operational parameters is Colonel Deke Hayward. As you know, Colonel Hayward was in commend of the aircraft over Tehran last night. He will make a brief statement, then take questions from you. Colonel Hayward."

Hayward stepped out into the light and walked easily up to the podium that seemed to him to be an island of light in a sea of dimly lit faces. He sought out the little plexiglass Tele-prompter screen and saw the pale green words glowing in the air in front of the podium, and he felt a little reassurance when he saw the prepared words he had studied for the past two hours hovering there, waiting for him.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I've been asked to relate to you what was involved in carrying out last night's mission, and I'll try to do so with as little jargon as possible, but I'll ask your pardon ahead of time and if there's something I say you're not clear about, I've been advised that there will be personnel available at the end of this conference to help you with any questions you might still have.

"Yesterday afternoon two U. S. Air Force B-2 bombers departed RAF Mendenhall for airspace over the Middle East. These two aircraft arrived on station in time to coincide with the President's address to the nation, and the world. These aircraft were refueled in-flight over Turkish airspace by U. S. Air Force KC-10 Extender aircraft, then proceeded to their assigned targets over their specified cities. We remained on target for approximately ten hours, then each aircraft returned to RAF Mendenhall, arriving at approximately 0900 GMT today. On our departure from airspace over Mecca and Tehran, two additional B-2 bombers resumed station over unspecified locations in the Middle East, and this operational tempo will continue until the President of the United States decides that this mission is no longer warranted or justified.

"The Press Packet each of you received has relevant operational details that you might find interesting, so rather than bore you unnecessarily with details ad nauseam and ad infinitum, I think it would be reasonable to turn this briefing over to you. I'll be happy to answer any questions of a non-classified nature you might have, so fire away."

As Hayward concluded his prepared remarks, his eyes seemed of their own volition to seek out Angela Stuart, the BBC One reporter who had caught his eye just moments before, and he saw her hand raised. He caught her eyes in his, and held them there a moment. "Yes, Miss Stuart, go ahead," Hayward said to her.

He could see satisfaction on the woman's face, satisfaction at having been chosen first and satisfaction at having been recognized before a global audience. "Yes, thank you, Colonel. You mentioned that your aircraft departed British airspace and refueled over Turkish airspace. Could you tell us, did your aircraft overfly airspace of other members of the European Union, or was your flight to the Middle East in international airspace?"

"Ah, yes, because of fuel constraints, it was necessary to fly the most direct route to the relevant airspace. Our flight plan took us over many member states of the European Union. Yes, Mr Duvall?" 

"Yes, Colonel, could you tell us, were the aircraft armed with nuclear weapons?"

"Yes, sir. Ah, Mr Rank?"

And so it went. Reporters questioned and sought clarification, asked Hayward for his opinion of the operational strategy of the mission (which he dodged successfully more than once), and through it all his eyes came back to Angela Stuart's time and time again. He sought reassurance there, and when he found none, he sought insight. He studied her face as he answered question after question, studied her reactions. Soon he noticed a wry smile on her face, and he shook himself from her gaze and let his eyes wander to another face, and he answered another question only to find his eyes locked squarely on Stuart's again. He began to sweat a bit, he could feel little beads of moisture forming on his upper lip, and he knew he had lost this round to her.

Soon the lights came up in the conference room and an RAF public affairs officer came out and thanked Colonel Hayward for his insight, and Hayward walked out of the light and off the stage.

"Nice work, Colonel," Air Marshal Lake said as Hayward returned to the briefing room.

"Nothing like a pretty face to focus on, eh Colonel?" said the squatty Air Force captain. He turned to see the smirk on her face.

"You know what, Captain. I could learn to hate you without much effort."

He watched her smile knowingly. "Want me to arrange an introduction?"

"Oh, I don't think that'll be necessary, Captain."

"She's a little out of your league, if I may say so, Colonel."

"Well, Captain, I'll let you know how it turns out after you've settled in at your new posting in Adak, Alaska." He smiled at the toad and walked away, whistling the simple refrain that John Wayne had whistled when he walked away from the stricken airplane at the end of The High and The Mighty.

____________________________________

Hayward took the GNER express to London later that night, and he sat - lost in his thoughts - as the train hurtled through the night. He could just make out the streaking landscape though the pale reflection his face cast on the cool glass, and he wondered if life wasn't like that. Could we ever get past the images of our selves, the reflections of ourselves that we cast out on a world? A world we can barely perceive through our own reflections? Could we ever really see, Hayward thought, the world through another person's eyes? If we could, he thought, so many misunderstandings could be avoided. 


Dark Passage



"It may be a perverted taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects ... The idea of prostitution is a meeting place of so many elements - lust, bitterness, complete absence of human contact, muscular frenzy, the clink of gold - that to peer into it makes one reel. One learns so many things in a brothel, and feels such sadness, and dreams so longingly of love!"  - Gustav Flaubert 

I sat on the terraza at the bottom of the cathedral steps and sipped at my second jarra of beer. I'd had it ten minutes and already it was lukewarm. My back was to the wall so that I could watch everyone who passed. Old habits die hard. 

There weren't many locals around only fat, sweating tourists bemoaning the intolerable heat. This was nothing. They should feel what it's like in Seville. That's the kind of heat that'll fuck you good, and won't buy you dinner afterwards.  

I almost called to them to quit their bellyaching. After all, it was two o'clock. Anyone with a grain of sense would be taking a siesta.

I lit a cigarette and glanced down at my day-old English newspaper. 

The paper was a fucking rag. No news, only shitty celebrity scoops and hysterical scare stories and a column or too dedicated to foreign affairs in the middle, before the sports. The sickly, clammy fear of terrorism pervaded it. Even seeping into the Blunder Leads to Own Goal stories and the Skinny Runt Popstar Snorting Cocaine scoops. They were right to be afraid too. The Game's all about fanaticism nowadays. 

It was not always thus. 

Maybe I was starting to get nostalgic, but I didn't think we were ever fanatical. Those of us on the front line, the Reds and us decadent Westerners, we didn't believe the politicians' bullshit any more than they did. We were just doing a job of work. That's why they called it the Cold War – we were cold fucking bastards to a man. We'd shoot you, but it was nothing personal. We weren't sending you to heaven or hell. Or anywhere. It was business. 

It was the Game. 

The Soviets thought they were playing chess, but we knew it was Snakes and Ladders. That's how we won. But now ... who knows what the fuck they're playing. I was well out of it.

Girona is a pleasant enough town to get lost in. With its winding mediaeval streets, and sprightly bright-coloured houses lining the river, it's almost – but not quite – diverting enough to let you forget what you're running from. 

I had found myself a nice spot to sit, drink my beer and try to ride out the midday heat. I had a view of the cathedral, and a good bit of shade. I didn't know how long I'd stay in town. I'd booked a hotel down near the Plaza de l'Independencia for a week, but probably wouldn't stay so long. There was an airport close by. I could go anywhere at short notice. I'd got some money and could always get more. 

I was free as a bird. 

Or, at least, free as a sparrow or a wren, always darting glances hither and thither on the lookout for cats and hawks. 

A raggedy woman pushing a ramshackle pram passed in front of the terraza, which was set back into an alcove away from the pavement. She shot me a sidelong glance and hurried on by. I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but she'd passed me a quarter an hour before going in the other direction. Being in the Service makes you paranoid, because being paranoid keeps you alive. 

Of course, she was watching me. 

Impoverished single mothers are prime material for recruitment: They always need money and the babe in arms gives them a sort of invisibility. Sexually unavailable, destitute and desperate, no one will look at them in case they ask for money or, worse, for pity and humanity. All she'd have to do to earn her silver dollars was to keep an eye on me, and let her handler know when I moved. 

Ideally there'd be two or three watchers, each taking home a few euros for their trouble. I angled my head to see beyond the wall on my left. Sure enough there was a man sat on the steps disinterestedly turning the pages of a novel.

Being a watcher is easy money, only don't get noticed. 

There'd be a professional stationed somewhere nearby. I'd never be able to spot them. They'd be too good.

That was it. I was getting out of there. 

I didn't much care for being followed, no matter who was following me and for what reason. Whoever was pulling the strings was something of a klutz, but even a clodhopping fool can kill you. The incompetence didn't rule out some serious fucking people.  

Throwing down a ten euro note, I rose from my seat and strode briskly from the cerveceria. Not looking left or right, I ran up the steps two at a time, passing the man with the book who studiously paid no heed to me. That proved it. No way do you blithely ignore a man running upstairs in the heat. He should at least have looked up or raised an eyebrow.

Panting, I reached the top and darted through the ancient archway and around the back of the cathedral entering into the narrow, gothic streets of the old town. I ducked and weaved my way through them until I was satisfied that no one was following, or, at least, that no one was hard on my heels.

I needed to lie low somewhere for a while before considering my next move. But where? The answer appeared in front of my eyes as I rounded the next corner: Scrawled in chalk on the wall was the word 'putas' with an arrow beneath it.

Whores. Why not? I could get off the streets and I hadn't had a good fuck in days.

I followed the direction of the arrow, arriving at a junction where there was another scribbled direction pointing the way to the 'burdel'. I rounded the corner and saw a black, nondescript door leading into a tumbledown house. The shutters were drawn and on the one nearest the door was written: 

'negras = 10e; romani = 15e; espanolas = 20e'

You'll know that Spain has stamped out racism when they start charging the same amount for their hookers. I looked more closely and, to my surprise, I made out beneath the price list the words: 'Inglesa = 30e'. This was added in a different hand. An English prostitute in a rundown brothel in Girona? 

She was probably some Spanish girl with her hair bleached blonde speaking pidgin English. A grotesque parody of Englishness for fantasist locals.

I rapped on the door and waited a few moments. No response. I knocked again. This time I heard movement from within. After half a minute or so, the door opened to reveal a dark, greasy haired Spaniard. He was short and slight, but had a dangerous look about him. 

He was the kind of guy you didn't want to let out of your sight, unless you wanted to find yourself a hundred euros poorer, and two pints of blood lighter. And he was ugly in a violent kind of a way, a big, deep scar across his cheek and missing one of his front teeth.

He grinned at me. It was a humourless, sinister smile and it made me want to sock him.

"Senor."

"No ab-low es-pan-yol," I said carefully.

"Ingles?"

"Si."

"Is no problem. We have English girl. Only trentay oor-o. You want? She is very good fuck."

"Sure." Perhaps she'd be able to understand fully the acts of depravity I wanted her to perform.

Beaming, he motioned me in, closing the door behind me. He held out his rough, gnarled hand, palm upwards and I reached into my wallet and extracted a twenty and a ten. I placed them unceremoniously into his grasping fingers. He nodded.

"Please you go upstairs. First room on left no es occupado. Wait there."

I did as I was told. The room was soiled and squalid, the walls yellow and streaked with grime and the bed workmanlike and uncomfortable looking. The sunlight broke through the ageing shutters in bright streaks in which motes of filth orbited one another. 

The venerable mattress and the sheets needed to be washed. In fact, they needed to be purified in the heat of a furnace. The room reeked of illicit sex. Grubby, musty, seedy. It smelled of sex at its most fundamental, its most raw.

No one had ever made love in this room. They had only fucked like animals and later felt ashamed of their lust. No spooning, no whispering in each other's ears, barely any words, only libidinous desire and sweat and semen.  

I could hear a couple wordlessly screwing through the flimsy wall. The creak of the bed, their harsh rasping breaths. The place was nasty, inhuman, sordid. My cock was already getting hard.

I took off my shirt and tossed it into the corner of the room. I wondered what was taking so long. Not that it mattered overmuch. I was in no hurry.

The pair next door finished up with a loud, masculine, urgent grunt. And I heard the sound of someone hurriedly dressing. There was a surprisingly decorous "gracias" from the john, then they made their adioses, the door opening and closing.

Shortly thereafter I recognised the voice of the swarthy pimp who'd shown me in. I could picture his sneering features. Then there came a rejoinder from a gentler female voice. I couldn't make out what they were saying, and even if I could I wouldn't have understood it. They fell silent and I heard footsteps in the corridor. The door to the room opened.

She was stunning. Garbed only in a white dressing gown, she stood in the doorway, one hand upon the knob. She smiled at me, it was a pretty smile although it was belied by the rest of her features. 

The smile did not play upon her startlingly blue eyes, which remained inscrutable. Maybe it was because she was so very beautiful, and so out of place, but she seemed a tragic, otherworldly figure, as if her entrance ought to be accompanied by some mass of Bach's in a minor key. 

The dressing gown was folded loosely, formlessly about her, but could not conceal her magnificent figure. The gown gapped slightly at her bosom, revealing the uppermost part of her cleavage. Her breasts curved elegantly. On the upper part of her sternum I could make out blot which was unmistakeably drying semen. There was a rivulet of it cloying upon her right cheek to boot. The john had obviously blown his load directly in her lovely face. Somehow that struck me as being rude.

Her hair was sandy blonde, her lips full and red and her cheeks were slightly flushed. 

"English?" she said.

"Yeah."

"Just let me get cleaned up. I'll be with you in a minute."

"Okay." My throat was dry.  She turned and walked away, her gait was languorous and her large, beautifully rounded arse swayed sensuously to and fro. She was Veronica Lake, she was Grace Kelly, she was Marilyn fucking Monroe.

What the fuck was a goddess like that doing in a hellhole like this? I could scarcely conceive of the misfortunes that had led her to this pass, and, for that matter, I could hardly believe my own good luck. That I was going to be able to have her. I'd already paid for her upfront.

Her absence from the room seemed interminable, building in me an erotic suspense I had not experienced since my earliest adolescent fumblings and awaking some long dead poetic sensibility in me, a sensibility I thought had been extinguished by colluding so closely with death for so many years. 

She was, I thought, another Iris, a votary of colour and beauty and divinity. I wanted now not just to fuck her, I thought in my feverish suspense, but to worship her and be redeemed by her.

At long last she returned, her blonde hair wet from her shower, the cumstain gone from her chest. She wore once more the white dressing gown, but I could see that her breasts were now restrained by a black negligee.

Coolly, she looked me up and down. "Well – what's your pleasure?"

"You get straight to business, huh?"

"Sorry. You didn't seem like the sort who'd want to chat," she said without emotion.

"I like to treat my whores like human beings."

"You'll forgive me if I don't feel the same way about johns." A faint trace of a smile played across her features.

"Careful now, I don't tip so good if I feel slighted."

"In which case I think you're a wonderful man, with wonderful, humane qualities, who pays for a fuck just wonderfully."

I laughed. "For someone living in a glass house you sure love to throw rocks. In case you'd forgotten, there are two people involved in this transaction."

"Three if you count Pedro out there. Two of us have the economic power, giving and receiving the money. And one of us just gets fucked."

"Sounds like one of us needs better representation."

She smiled. "Tell me about it. Hell of a way to exist - 'Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty ...' "

I recognised the verse. "Hamlet," I said as matter-of-factly as I could muster.

"You are a man of hidden depths, Mr ..."

"Smith."

"Ah yes. First name John? Mr Smith, in this profession one meets many men who share your name," she said archly.

"I bet."

"But not many who have your good looks and self assurance. Surely you don't have to pay for a fuck."

"One learns so many things in a brothel," I said vaguely. "How about you? How come you're here? What the fuck did you do? What's your name?" I didn't mean for so many questions to come tumbling out at once, and I felt foolish.

She answered only my last question, and it wasn't much of an answer at that: "The name's Smith," she said with a disingenuous smile.

She fell silent and looked away, then shrugged off her dressing gown revealing her black, lacy teddy. 

"I believe, Mr Smith, that you paid for my cunt. Unless you handed over ready money for my sparkling conversation."

I nodded. "I paid for your cunt ... and for whatever else is on offer."

She was silent a moment, then said quietly and forcefully: "I don't do anal."

From the moment the words left her lips, I wanted nothing more than to take her arse.

"Why not?" I asked casually.

She shrugged.

"Never have. I guess I'd feel too dirty." She laughed. "Sounds odd coming from a whore doesn't it?"

I wasn't to be deterred. "Any chance you'd change your mind?"

"None."

I considered a moment. "I bet I can make you beg me to fuck your arsehole."

"I daresay you could," she said steadily. "You have a wintry look about you. Hard, determined. You're a man who can get what he wants. You know, I'm sure, that all I have to do is scream and Pedro will be in here. And he's a hard man too."

"Jesus," I said, grinning, "I wasn't threatening you. I meant that I can get you so worked up that you'll want me in your arse. You'll invite me in."

She looked critical. "You know that myth about whores never cumming with their clients. Turns out - it's not a myth."

"I've factored that in." 

"So, Svengali, let me get this straight - you can turn me on so much that I'll overcome my distaste, let go my inhibitions and forget I'm a pro," she said scornfully. 

"As our American cousins might say - you can bet your ass I will."

She seemed a little taken a back by my confidence, and smiled a little, though it was a false, coquettish pornstar sort of a smile.

The challenge continued to hang in the stale air, and behind the false, pouting smile, I thought I detected a little excitement. "You're on," she said huskily. "But don't get your hopes up."

She stood before me in her lonely slip, whose material was opaque but clearly outlined her nipples, and failed to cover her skimpy black knickers. 

I stood admiring her a while, enjoying the sight of her near-nakedness in the streaky afternoon light. 

It was hot, and beads of sweat were just forming above her cleavage. Her breasts were high and firm, holding the material of the loose-fitting teddy away from her belly. Her thighs were toned and pale and smooth. I noticed that she wasn't wearing anything on her feet.

"So," she said at last, arching her left eyebrow, "you think you've got game. Impress me."

I needed no further invitation: I rose from the bed and grasped her shoulders firmly, holding her fast in front of me.  I stared intently down into her eyes, which darted uneasily too and fro before reluctantly returning my gaze. 

After a while she tried to pull away and I prevented her. I wanted her to know who was boss, that I could take her however I pleased.

She hated it. 

Some women like to be dominated, but she didn't. She evidently liked to be in control.

Fuck, I had forgotten she was a whore. No naughty girl, dirty girl fantasies – no rape fetish. She'd fucking lived it. Men had paid to use and abuse her body, had brutalised and pounded away any feminine impulse towards submissiveness or masochism.

If I wanted to fuck her arse, then I would need to be gentler, more circumspect. I relented; gently hugging her and inclining my head forward in order to kiss her softly on the lips. I felt her body relax a little.

She kissed me back and hard, thrusting her tongue into my mouth, working her lips against mine. Her hands clasped my shoulder blades and, standing on tiptoe, she pressed her breasts into my chest, her nipples felt hard through the fabric of the cheap, flimsy teddy.

We had tussled briefly for control and she had, for the moment, triumphed. I was prepared to cede control of the situation to her. In that embrace and that kiss, we each learned a little about one another's predilections, about what we wanted and how much we were prepared to sacrifice.

And she was turned on. At least, the kiss seemed genuine enough. 

Her hand snaked down across my naked chest, down across my stomach, resting just above the belt of my trousers. She paused a little, then kissed my neck and moved her hand down, so it was resting against my stiffening cock. She began to rub it through the loose woven cotton, rasping out a manifestly fake Hollywood groan as she did so. I couldn't resist a grin. 

She loosened my belt and slipped her hand under the waistline of my trousers, and I breathed in to accommodate her. She deftly manoeuvred her hand through the fly of my boxers and her palm moved against my naked shaft. 

Her fingers arched downwards towards the head of my cock. She gasped another ersatz gasp and she widened her eyes in pseudo surprise. 

"It's so big," she purred. 

I wasn't buying it. She must have had bigger cocks than mine, and, besides, she wasn't that good an actress. This was all business patter for her. 

I imagined her in the next room with her Spanish John. Oh! she'd say in her practised silken tones. Es muy grande! 

She kissed me on the cheek as she continued to rub and grasp at my cock, feeling it harden against her palm. After a few moments, she pulled her hand out, and guided me gently back onto the bed.

I didn't resist, sat upon it and leaned languidly against the wall. She stood back from me and pursed her lips lasciviously. She proceeded to lean forward, showing off her impressive cleavage, and tightening her thigh and calf muscles in order to exhibit her smooth, wonderfully sculpted legs.

She licked her lips. Can you believe, she said wordlessly in her expression and in her stature, that you are going to get to fuck me? Me - an unutterably beautiful woman?

I gave her the dazed, breathless little half-smile she seemed to be inviting. This was her comfort-zone. An awestruck trick, semi-hard cock in his hand and she in control. Showing, offering, eventually granting.  

She began a languorous, well-rehearsed striptease.  In no hurry to remove her scanty clothes, she moved her hands across her body, swaying her hips easily to and fro as she did so. She lifted her breasts together and smiled absently at me. 

Fuck, she was gorgeous. I'd wager a good many of her more excitable clients had cum just watching the show. An easy fifteen minutes' work.

She turned her back to me and leaned away, showing off her plump, curved arse. Swaying her hips, she danced to some unheard music. The motion of her posterior was mesmeric. Slowly moving back and forth, now rotating, now shimmying in the hazy, grimy, sleepy Spanish afternoon. She had become Salome dancing in the desert heat.




Dark Passage



I unbuckled my belt, unbuttoned my jeans and squirmed out of them, pulled my cock from my boxer shorts and slowly worked my fist around it as I watched her. 

Still facing away from me, she pulled the straps of her teddy down over her shoulders and slowly danced herself out of it. It fell to the floor in a crumpled heap. She toyed with the elastic of her knickers, pulling it out with her thumbs, and releasing it so that it snapped back against her skin. 

She moved her hands round in front of her and out of my sight. She remained in that posture for the longest time, her head slightly askance. Her knickers seemed incongruous on her. She looked rather like a bowdlerised statue of Artemis. 

Unhurriedly, she turned, clasping her tits. I continued my leisurely, lazy wank as she exposed her breasts to me by degrees. She massaged them lethargically, then commenced moving her hands over them in circular motions, her pretty rose-pink nipples occasionally emerging from behind her fingers. 

At length, she removed her hands altogether, leaving her nipples exposed and tremblingly erect. 

Slowly, slowly, slowly she removed her knickers. Her pussy was shaven, save for a strip of wispy, golden pubic hair above it. She stood naked before me. 

Now she was Artemis indeed. Divine, forbidden. I felt that I would be transfigured and undone for my sin in witnessing such exposed beauty.

She again cupped her breasts, and tugged lightly at her nipples, then smiled appreciatively at my erection.

"Want me to suck it?" she asked. And in an instant metamorphosed from unearthly goddess to earthy whore.

I collected myself and by way of answer, scrambled out of my boxers and shifted myself forward on the bed, perching on the edge of it. 

Getting down onto her hands and knees she crawled towards me, a filthy, demoniacal look in her eye. On reaching me, she squatted back onto her haunches, her face so near me that I could feel her warm breath on my cock. She grasped me at the base of my shaft. My tip glistened with precum, my penis twitched in anticipation. 

She didn't stand for much ceremony and proceeded to take my head into her mouth. This was to be no holds barred cocksucking. 

She rolled her tongue around the head of my dick and sucked, licking all around it and probing at my peehole. After the torpor of the striptease, this new urgency took me by surprise. 

It occurred to me that this sudden ardour was a strategy: She was looking for the quick cum. A quick suck and a quick fuck and I'd be exhausted and her arse would be safe. 

This woman gave a very good blowjob. Her tongue was frenzied against my sensitive head. I groaned a little, and surrendered to the sensations she was awaking in me. All right - she could have my first cum, but I hadn't lost sight of the endgame.

She took me deeper into her mouth, swallowing me inch by inch, until she had half of my length in her mouth. Her tongue wagged and thrashed against my shaven shaft. 

I was transported, utterly enraptured by her. Short, intense thrills of pure sordid lust transfixed me, wracking my entire body. I felt like I'd been winded. 

She turned her attention back to the head of my cock, her teeth grazing it as she moved back up to it. The bursts of pleasure intensified, each one a harbinger of the paradise to come. This was the best blowjob I'd ever had. Again, she worked her mouth on it in a frenzy. She grabbed my shaft with her hand and worked it up and down. Sucking and licking and nibbling at my head as she did so. We both knew I wasn't going to last long.

She desisted in licking my cock, and instead began in earnest to wank me off. Gazing intently up at me as she did so. Her left hand reached underneath me to toy with my balls. I could feel my orgasm now, sense its inevitability and its magnitude.

Still furiously rubbing my cock, she leaned forward and kissed my balls. She sucked on them one at a time, and swilled her tongue around them in a long fluid motion. Then she took my hairless ball sack entirely into her mouth. She must have felt my bollocks tighten in her mouth, I was so close.

She gripped my shaft hard, strangling my climax, and stopping my semen in its tracks. Christ, I felt like I was going to explode. Leaving my balls, she moved her face back around in front of me. And still grasping the base of my cock firmly, began once again to suck on it.

She took me deeper this time, swallowing my length as far as she was able with her hand upon me. My head was at her throat. My cock jerked and spasmed now, crying out for release. The sensation was overpowering. Intense, and not a little painful.

Sensing my discomfort she moved her mouth back to the tip of my cock and sucked on it.

Then, at long, long last, she relinquished her grip on my shaft. I groaned as I came, shooting load after load into her gorgeous mouth. She swallowed most of it down, but when I had finished, a streak of semen ran from the corner of her mouth down to her chin.

She smiled victoriously up at me.

I returned the smile, and raised it to a predatory leer. I watched her triumphant expression fade, and morph into one of consternation and uncertainty.

It was my turn.

I crouched down next to her, and turned her head to face me and kissed her softly on the lips. I could taste my own cum in her mouth, but that didn't phase me. My tongue met with hers, and moved slowly against it. I moved my hands to her breasts, feeling her nipples hard against my hand. Her tits were firm and yet pliant.

In stark contrast to her methods, I was going to take my time pleasuring her. I wanted to take her up the arse, and the best way to do that was to make myself the architect of a monumental orgasm.

I kissed her harder, and lightly pinched her left nipple between my thumb and forefinger. Then, manoeuvring myself around her, I gently pushed her backward, catching her behind her shoulders with my right arm, and forcing my left beneath her knees. I scooped her up and stood, holding her in my arms.

She was surprisingly light. I placed her delicately down on the bed. Her expression now was tractable and amused, ready to allow me my attempt at arousing her, and sceptical of my chances.

And yet, her body belied her. Her nipples were hard, and her breath a little short.  I lightly traced her slit with my middle finger and her legs involuntarily opened a little to accommodate me. 

I was pleased to note that she was already a little wet.

I began to explore her body with my hands and lips, kissed her neck, her sternum, her sides. My hands worked around her waist, her armpits and her thighs. She tasted a little of soap, mingled with the salt of her sweat. 

I was here and there and everywhere, lingering a while at her bellybutton, passing quickly over her breasts and nipples. I was careful to mark her response. She liked it when I tickled her behind her knee, shuddered a little when I kissed her ear, and when I touched her toes.

Slowly, painstakingly I mapped her sexual predilections and peccadilloes. I ignored those areas where she was unresponsive, and took especial care to stimulate her where she desired it. I loitered for a long time around her midriff, stroking her smooth belly, and kissing her navel. She gave a small moan of pleasure, which she quickly suppressed.

She was enjoying my unhurried attentions, but was a little bemused by them. I had caught her on the back foot. She was unused to this level of assiduity from a john. 

My whole object was to perpetrate a confidence trick, to make her feel in that moment like she was my sweetheart and I hers. 

I began to pay attention to her breasts. I rested my hands on them, and kissed my way up to them. I proceeded to suck on and lightly tug at her nipples with my teeth. 

I spread her legs to give me access to her inner thighs. Just by looking at her pussy, I could see that she was highly aroused. Her cuntlips were engorged and pink, and her juices were visibly flowing.  I kissed her left thigh, my lips tantalisingly close to her womanhood. I felt her whole body tremble in anticipation.

I knew it was time to raise the stakes.

Hesitating only a moment, I kissed her vulva. She gave a low moan of relief as I worked my lips against hers. 

Opening my mouth a little, I pressed my tongue against her swollen pussy, savouring the sharp taste of her arousal. She began urgently to writhe her hips about, grinding her cunt against my face, and making her impatience abundantly clear to me.

I needed no further urging, and began to lick her up and down with long insistent strokes of my tongue. She was thrusting herself against me now, and I grabbed her waist with both hands to steady her.  I pushed my tongue as deep as I could inside her and flicked it upwards toward her clit. 

"Oh, fuck, yeah," she gasped and I felt her fanny twitch and convulse around me. I changed the angle of my attack, and began to run my tongue in circles against her hard little bud.

She gasped and I could tell that she was really getting into it now. I stopped licking her and grasped her pudendum firmly between my thumb and forefinger, pinching the folds of her flesh together over her clit. I just held her like that for a moment, and let her do the work herself, bucking her hips and using my fingers to wank herself.

Spreading her lips once more, I recommenced my oral onslaught against her clit. Expertly, I rolled my tongue and took her erect little nub inside it, fucking it back and forth. This drove her wild, and she began to thrash about, crying for me to continue. I gently nibbled on her sensitive centre. And pulled her this way and that with my tongue.

I slowed a little, and holding my tongue against her clit, I began to hum, trying to maintain a steady baritone.

She moaned her appreciation.

My face was still buried deep in her cunt, and I was still humming on her clit, when I heard the door open behind me. Swiftly, I moved my hand to continue the work of my tongue and teeth, and looked around. It seemed that she was oblivious to the intrusion and was mauling and tugging at her nipples with her eyes tightly closed as I arched my fingers upward to tickle her g-spot. 

The Morisco pimp stood in the doorway. He grinned a knowing, disgusting sort of a grin. 

"You have been long time ..." he observed. "Other men wait." Wordlessly, the fingers of my right still flexing and twisting inside her vagina, my thumb upon her clit, I reached for my trousers with my left. I pulled out my wallet, deftly flipped it open and then more awkwardly pulled out a fifty euro note. I screwed it up and threw it in his direction. 

He stooped to pick it up and smiled lecherously, before turning and walking out of the room, closing the door behind him.

The grasping bastard could have waited.

I returned my attention to the squirming, spasming whore before me. I pulled my fingers out from inside her and guided her right hand down to take my place at her clit. Eagerly, she began rubbing herself. Then, grasping both her legs, I lifted her hips slightly, inclined my head downwards, and began forcefully licking her arsehole. She squealed her surprise, but the shock didn't interrupt her vigorous masturbation, only intensified it.

She loved my tongue on her pungent, forbidden little hole. 

I kissed it like I was kissing her on the mouth or on the cunt, full and deep and without reservation. 

"You dirty fucking bastard," she gasped in lust and disbelief.

Stiffening my tongue as much as I was able, I pushed it deeper inside her, greedily licking the most private, intimate area of her body, sampling its musky, heady delights.

I spread her arsecheeks apart, gapping her dark, dusky little opening a little more. I lapped at her greedily, teasing her sensitive ring, questing and tasting ever deeper into her secret, nasty little bumhole.

Her sphincter was tight even against my tongue, and I could well believe she had never been taken up the arse before. Spreading her still further open, I began to lick the upper wall of her anus. The sounds of my slurping, gourmandising arse-eating mingled with her groans of pleasure.

Her hand was now moving furiously against her clit and I felt her arsehole beginning to clench around my tongue and guessed that her orgasm was near. 

Now was my chance. Now that I had worked her up into a frenzy, and had fetishised her arsehole, I could at last obtain my goal.

All at once I desisted my oral assault on her ass, and swiftly grabbed both of her hands, pinning her back against the bed. Immobilised, she began to writhe and contort herself, seeking to complete the climax which had been so suddenly denied her.

I looked her in the eye and said: "I'll let you cum, if you give me your arse."

She gazed up at me in fear and yearning. She struggled against my grip, testing my strength and my resolve, before she at last submitted to me and agreed to my ultimatum.

"Okay!" she panted, thrashing about helplessly in my grasp, trying in vain to rub her clit against my leg, against the bed clothes, anything to get herself off. "You win! I want you to fuck me in my arse. I want your cock in my little, tight arsehole." 

I held her for another few seconds.

"Ask nicely."

"You fucking bastard! Fuck my fucking arse!"

"Say please."

"Please, please, please, please."

I released her and she scrambled round onto her front, grabbing a pillow and putting it underneath her belly as she did so. She lay prostrate before me with her tight, puckered arsehole elevated and exposed. I advanced toward her. My dick was rock hard and I was alive with, and almost overcome by, the anticipation of taking her anal virginity.

I pressed my helmet against her dark, forbidden little hole.

"Wait!" she said suddenly and urgently. She opened the drawer of the nightstand, reached into it and retrieved some lubricant. "Please use this."

I obliged her. I squirted a generous helping onto my hand and massaged it onto my cock. I then squirted some more directly onto her arsehole. She moaned as I rubbed it around her and worked it a little inside with my index finger. Fuck, she was tight. 

This was going to be fantastic.

Now that she was sufficiently lubed, I again pressed my cock at her rear entrance. Again she cried fearfully:

"Wait!"

"I hope you're not going to walsh on our deal," I said reproachfully. My arousal was at such a feverish pitch, it was all I could do not to just take her hard then and there.

"No," she said softly. "But if we're going to do this, I'd like to have some control. Please. You lie down and I'll lower myself onto you."

I demurred and stood back as, trembling like a leaf, she stood up from the bed. I lay down in her place, my greasy, glistening cock pointing upward. 

She straddled me and grabbed my slippery dick, guiding it towards my prize. She sat back a little and I was once again tantalisingly close to my goal. I felt my head against her arsehole once more. 

Very gingerly, she lowered herself onto my cock. Oh god, she was so tight. 

"Fuck," she gasped as my cockhead began to enter her arse, "it's like being a virgin again."

I felt a pop as her sphincter opened and her eyes widened in surprise.

"You're cock is inside my ass," she whispered in disbelief. She lowered herself a little more, the lubricant helping me to penetrate just a little deeper. Her anus was vicelike, her muscles contracting hard against my cock. "Oh fuck," she breathed. "It hurts."

"Relax," I said soothingly, although I was sorely tempted to knock her right arm out from under her to cause her to fall and force my whole cock up inside her all at once.

I managed to remain patient. I didn't really want to hurt her, and, besides, I was enjoying my slow progress into her tight, trembling arse.

"I can take it, I can take it, I can take it." She repeated the phrase like a mantra. She breathed deeply a couple of times and I felt her arsehole relax a little, and by gently, slowly, lowering herself slightly, she was able admit another inch or so of my length. She moaned.

I could see her pussy lips twitching and her clit shuddering and feel her sphincter clenching and unclenching around my cock.

Another deep breath, another centimetre yielded to me.

At that moment, with that last secession, she found that she was enjoying herself. To her evident surprise, she discovered that she rather liked having a cock in her arse.  

"Oh yeah," she said vigorously, her eyes afire, "you're fucking cock is deep in my dirty fucking arsehole. Is it fucking tight enough for you?"

I nodded mutely. It was fucking tight enough.

With that, she lost what remained of her inhibitions, and sat abruptly down upon my cock, taking almost my full length inside her. She leant forward, putting her hands upon my shoulders, and began to rock her arse forwards and backwards. Slowly at first, then getting quicker and more urgent.

"I can't believe you're in my fucking arse," she panted. "And it feels fucking fantastic."

She sat back up again, moving her left arm behind her onto the bed to steady her. Her right hand flew to her clit, which seemed urgently to require attention. She rubbed it with animalistic abandon, caring nothing now for nicety, only for her looming orgasm.

She squatted up and down on my cock, and I moved my hips to match her rhythm, ensuring as I did so that she was still in control. Her fingers moved wildly against her clit, pulling it this way and that and tugging at it. She was becoming more and more earnest in her movements and I could feel her climax building. 

Her anal muscles were squeezing my cock more rapidly and more insistently now and the mouth of her pussy was convulsing. Her fingers were mauling her clit ever more quickly and ever more viciously. I could feel my own climax nearing as she urgently ground her arse up and down the length of my cock. 

She gave a strangled yell as she came, and her cunt heaved and spasmed. Her arse gripped my cock spasmodically and without rhythm and she threw her head back. She squirted a little warm liquid onto my stomach and I couldn't tell if it was piss or pussy juice. At that moment I didn't much care.

Before she had time to collect herself, or to come down fully from her orgasm, I guided her off my rockhard cock and onto her front, positioning the pillow once more beneath her to raise her twitching arsehole toward me. It was still a little agape as I once again guided my cockhead to her entrance. This time there was no reluctance and no protestation as I forced myself inside her. 

I reached beneath her to her soaking pussy, and pushed two fingers inside it as I began earnestly to fuck her in her arse. Her hand joined with mine as she reached down to rub her clit.

She was quickly nearing once more the peak of her orgasm, as the insistent nature of her assault on her clit, and the rapid contractions of her sphincter against my cock attested.

Her pussy muscles, clenched and unclenched around my finger, and she screamed out her ecstasy into the dirty bedclothes.

I felt my own arsehole tighten, and knew that my own climax was close. Fuck, it was going to be a big one. I increased my pace, thrusting my cock rapidly in and out of her arse. Then, at last, I came.

It was a much more powerful orgasm than my first; partly because it was much more hard fought, and partly because her arsehole was so very tight and so forbidden.

My balls tensed, and my shaft twitched and tautened and I exploded deep in her arse, squirting four or five times before I was spent.  

I pulled my cock out, and her twitching arsehole ejected a little of my cum, which ran slowly down towards her pussy.

"Oh my god, oh my god," she said in disbelief. "That was amazing. I never knew what I'd been missing ..."

"No need to thank me."




Dark Passage



She collected herself a little. "No, no. I must thank you. You've opened up my arse and a whole new revenue stream for me."

"Just like a whore, it doesn't take long to remember the money," I laughed.

"Just like a whore - because no one else ever thinks about fucking or surviving," she replied smartly.

I climbed off the bed and began to dress myself. She did likewise.

"Guess I'll be walking like John Wayne tomorrow," she said sheepishly, as she pulled on her knickers. I laughed politely and turned from her. I buckled my trousers, and pulled on my shirt. 

She stole up beside me as I did so.

"I'm in trouble," she breathed in my ear. "I can't explain now. Meet me at ten on the Passeig de la Muralla. Please."

And she turned and was gone. 

My reflex was to help her. Maybe it was some chemical response in my postcoital brain, or some chivalry or chauvinism in me, but I was convinced that I ought to rescue her. She had moved through a series of female tropes for me; from goddess, to whore, to damsel in distress.

What she had never yet seemed to me was a human being.

Peculiarly for a paranoiac like me, it didn't even enter into my head that her request might be a trap.

Scooping up my wallet, I left the room, and descended the rickety stairs.

My hand on the doorknob, I heard a filthy cackle from behind me. I turned. The pimp sneered derisively at me.

"She let you fuck her up her culo?" he grinned. "Ha! Ha! 'Oh meester, I so scared. You so big. You pay Pedro cincuenta euros.' Ha! Ha! She play you like a matador. She lower the cape and muleta, and you charge. She is good little whore, no?"

I did not dignify him with a response, but immediately left, slamming the door behind me. His laughter followed me down the cobbled street. It was absurd. He didn't see. She didn't play me, I played her. And she wasn't acting or faking. No one's that good. It was absurd. He didn't know.

I didn't forget to listen out for footsteps behind me, nor to glance into the doorways and alleyways I passed. I wasn't being followed. The streets of the old town were deserted.

I hurried back to the hotel to shower. Having washed the stench of sex off myself, I collapsed naked onto the bed and dozed a while. 

I roused myself at twenty past nine, threw on some fresh clothes and struck out for the appointed rendezvous.

It was dusky and oddly quiet. There weren't many people around, and not much traffic. I crossed the square to the river, walking briskly up the Passeig Canalajes and over the bridge.

It was a pleasant evening, wonderfully cool after the intense heat of the day, and my stroll south along the river was an agreeable one. 

I wondered as I walked what sort of trouble the beautiful whore was in. Had she been kidnapped and trafficked? Was she addicted to drugs? Had she robbed her pimp?

Whatever it was, I had determined to rescue her. I was surprised by the fanciful imaginings I began to have of our moonlit meeting, of her hushed, urgent tones pleading with my strength and masculinity to help her in her weakness and desperation.

I fantasised in the twilight of her rescue and of our lovemaking afterwards. God help me, I even began to imagine us married and in a little cottage in the Cotswalds with two pretty little children.

I shook myself out of my reverie as I reached the Plaza Catalunya and crossed it, making for the Muralla gardens.

The ancient city wall ran alongside the steep incline of the Passeig de Muralla itself. I glanced at my watch. It was ten to ten. 

I walked up the ancient street, picking my way carefully in the darkness. About half way up the street I noticed a figure hunched up against the wall. I knew at once there was something terribly wrong. It was preternaturally still, and awkwardly positioned.

Even at that distance, in that darkness, I could tell that I was looking at a dead body.

My heart was pounding in my ears as I approached, and the night suddenly seemed icy cold as I approached. 

I stood in something tacky and knew without looking down that it was blood.

As I came almost within touching distance, I heaved a sigh of relief. I could see by the moonlight that this was clearly a man's body. It wasn't her.

It wasn't her.

I crouched down next to the corpse and lifted its face upward, coating my hands in blood as I did so.

What the hell?

It was her pimp, still leering at me, though now in a rictus death grin. His throat had been cut.

Oh fuck.

I felt a sickening sense of dread.

I had no time to collect my thoughts as I heard men running towards me. I instinctively made to fly, but was thwarted by the sound of footsteps in the other direction. I had no time even to scale the wall. 

The men in the darkness were almost upon me.

"Polizia! Polizia!" they bellowed and I was cornered.  What the fuck.



Dark Passage



Could people in Mecca or Tehran, he wondered, understand why the West had felt compelled to resort to such extreme measures to protect it's interests and ideas? Could people in the West understand the consequences of the fear generated by this action? Where could these reactions lead but to further misunderstanding. Misunderstanding was the only course available to people who only looked in the mirrors of their own soul.

Hayward turned and looked at the empty seats in the First Class car, then stood and walked back to the Lounge Car. He ordered a scotch and water and talked to the steward there, then turned to walk back to his seat after he dropped a pound note into the steward's tip cup, and there she was. He felt his heart lurch in his chest when he recognized that face, and he stumbled to a halt as she drew near. She seemed to be quite focused on him, and the drink in his hand.

"Rough couple of days, Colonel?" Angela Stuart said.

"You've no idea, Ma'am." He was conscious of his hands beginning to tremble as his eyes lingered on the woman the Financial Times had recently stated had The Most Beautiful Face in British Broadcasting. He thought in a sudden flash how silly that was, but the effect she had on him was unmistakable, and it left him feeling suddenly very unsure of himself - like he was a school boy once again. Innocent, pale green eyes, light red hair, a complexion so fair it caught Hayward by surprise. But it was her eyes he kept coming back to. Luminous pools. Luminous, dewy pools, and they took his breath away. She wasn't tall, far from it, in fact, but she was perfect.

"Feel like talking about it?" she said with something like a sly grin on her cool, alabaster face.

"Not sure what I could tell you, on the record, that is."

"Doesn't have to be for publication, Colonel."

"Name's Deke, Ma'am."

"And mine is Angela." She held out her right hand, and he took it. "What are you having?" she asked while eyeing his scotch.

"Ah! Sorry! Would you care for something?" She smiled and nodded.

They walked back to his seat after they collected her drink, and began talking as soon as they sat in the darkened car, first about the mission he'd flown over Tehran the night before, then about his career, and later, even a little about his family back in Helena, Montana. She was a wonderful listener, he said to himself more than once as he watched her eyes following his mouth as he talked. Though he doubted her sincerity - she was press, after all - he watched empathy and understanding roll across her face while he talked about flying the B-2 and the physical toll it took on both crew and aircraft on such long missions. She was a natural listener, and he soon was talking about the complexity of the operation the president had outlined, and his misgivings about the plan.

"Do you think it can be done?" she asked him after he had said a lot more than he should have.

"Yes, I suppose so. As long as there aren't any other fires to put out."

"What about the Chinese? The mutual defense treaty with Iran? And there's word that the Russians may have entered into a secret treaty with the Iranians as well."

"Sounds kind of like 1914 again. The guns of August, you know? I don't know, really. Why would the Russians and the Chinese run to support the Iranians if it could be shown that they were truly supporting efforts to back terrorist campaigns in Europe and America? Wouldn't they then be complicit in supporting terrorism? What would they gain from that?"

"It gets complicated, doesn't it?" she said with more than a little sadness written on her face. I wonder where all this is going to lead. There are few precedents for this environment."

"Well, I don't know. I don't think God put us here just to let us blow ourselves off the planet. Seems kinda silly to me, you know." He smiled, she smiled, and it was as if they had reached some kind of an understanding. He took a long pull from his scotch and looked at her while she did the same. Her eyes held his, and he felt a stirring in his belly.

Soon, too soon, Hayward thought, the train slowed as it entered King's Cross. The end of the line, he thought, in more ways than one. The end of his time with this beautiful woman. Pity.

"So, Colonel, where are you staying?" Stuart said as she stood and watched as Hayward collected her things from the overhead rack.

"Oh, just some hole in the wall by the embassy. Have to brief some politicos from Washington in the morning. The usual crap, er, excuse me, Ma'am." He smiled again, and even though he was forty three years old he felt himself blushing.

"Could I interest you in a nightcap?" Stuart said. "At my place?"

_______________________________________

Hayward stood at a lectern before members of the House Armed Services Committee and went over the President's operational directive, and the National Security Council document that supported it. There was little here that the congressmen and women didn't already know, but they wanted to hear it all from the man who would be in charge of implementing the operation - they wanted to her that it was in fact a doable plan. None questioned the legitimacy of the plan, as none addressed the possible implications of a nuclear counter-strike against the United States; the only concern in evidence was the operational tempo dictated by the plan, and the necessity to expand the B-2 fleet as a consequence. Hayward found this attitude curious, but he wasn't surprised. Once men reached this level of power and authority, Hayward had long observed, most of these pompous assholes took on an air of invincibility that was truly unnerving.

After the Democratic Party's humiliating defeat in 2008, all opposition to the new Republican majority's ascension to total domination of the American political landscape simply evaporated. Evangelicals - who had long been moving supporters into key positions in the military's service academies - soon controlled the Joint Chiefs and key command structures in all the armed services. The new president was as fundamentalist as one could find in America, and he continued his predecessors habit of having all policy decisions reviewed by religious scholars to see if said policies conformed to "End Times" prophesy. Many religious moderates, which Hayward considered himself to be, grew concerned that the president's policies would lead to a self-fulfilling prophesy. Like President Bush before him, the new president continued to spend money like there was no tomorrow, it was said, simply because he didn't believe in tomorrow. He believed in Armageddon. Congress resumed acting as little more than a rubber-stamp for the increasingly narrow policy initiatives that marked the new administrations conservative agenda, and the domestic economy was now seen by many as teetering on the brink of collapse as budget and trade deficit hit figures that had here-to-for been considered impossible.

This surge in fundamentalism had swept into Europe as a new wave of conservatism had begun to grip the European populace in the aftermath of Islamic bombings in Berlin and Toulouse. As the quagmire in Iraq continued unabated, Islamic hatred of all things western simply exploded, and grew even more violent after the first year of the Palestinian Civil War and the collapse of Lebanon into renewed anarchy. When the Christian world woke to the news that Copenhagen had simply disappeared after a nuclear weapon was detonated there, all eyes looked at the new American President first for solace - then revenge.

Operation Resurgent Glory was the President's response, and reaction from both American and European news organs was universal in it's praise of the plan's daring simplicity; few western pundits, in fact, criticized the plan at all. Universal condemnation, however, blared forth from news outlets in both Asia and Russia, which western observers took as a sure sign of the plans unquestionable soundness. 

So, Hayward listened as Congressmen asked questions about the men and material that would be needed to carry out the plan successfully, and he rattled off numbers easily, but sometime during that morning's questioning he drifted away from the numbers and questions; he drifted back into the mysteries of last night, back into Stuart's arms. He brought his hand surreptitiously to his face occasionally, and he could still smell her there on his fingers. He felt a surge of animal pride when he did, and he looked forward to seeing her again that very night.

_________________________________________

Outside of Tehran, Iran

Republican Guards Covert Operations Directorate

Mohammed al-Zaq sat in the waiting room outside the Director's office. He held a briefcase tightly in his hands, so tightly in fact that his hands shook from the unconscious effort to hold the grip so tightly. He felt the need to urinate but dismissed the idea as ludicrous; he had gone not ten minutes before. His nerves were shot, his fingernails had all been chewed off weeks ago, and his stomach burned with an insistent fury that even the best western medication was unable to contain. His eyes ached, and the headache he had suffered from for the past three months simply refused to subside, even when he slept.

The door to the Director's office opened, and al-Zaq jumped at the sound. He stood when the Director's aide summoned him, and he walked inside as steadily as he could. He held his briefcase protectively in front of his groin as he walked in, and sat in the chair indicated by the Director. Al-Zaq looked at maps and figures on the Director's desk; many were either Russian or Chinese, and that struck him as very odd. He sat in silence as the Director finished reading something on his computer, and when the man looked up at him, he saw furies of Hell burning visibly behind his eyes.

"You have the operational plans with you?"

"Yes sir."

"Copenhagen was a success. What makes you think we can pull off an operation of this scale using such a similar operational concept again?"

"Because, as expected, sir, they have not developed a working theory of the weapon's delivery. Without that crucial knowledge, sir, they would have no way of mounting a credible deterrent; even developing a workable means of detection would be almost impossible - even if they knew where to look, and when."

Zaq had been in charge of the Copenhagen operation from inception to completion, and with it's success his stature in the Guards had grown immensely. There was talk he would be promoted to Colonel soon, and this long before the decision had been made to generate contingency plans for an even more ambitious assault on western targets.

The Copenhagen strike had been remarkably simple in both plan and execution, and would have been, in fact and theory, almost impossible for a tipped-off intelligence service to detect. Without such intelligence, the city had perished with absolutely no warning. Not once had al-Zaq considered this when he drew up the plans. The proud Danes had insulted the Prophet, hadn't they. They would reap the whirlwind.

The plan had come to Zaq while on a Protective Services mission to Cannes several years before. Would it not be possible to take a sailboat and place a warhead inside it's lead keel, then sail the boat to the desired target and detonate it? The lead in the keel would conceal any radiation signature from the approaching boat, wouldn't it? One could conceal the boat's entry and detonation by having the boat follow a large ship or ferry into port, thus leading investigators to believe the device had been smuggled in on the larger ship? All material evidence would be destroyed in the explosion, only radiation signatures would remain, and these could - with care - be manipulated to lead investigators to any number of dead ends.

A french sailboat had been acquired and suitably modified, and a professional delivery service engaged to move the boat from Croatia to northern Europe. Once there, three Republican Guardsmen had boarded the vessel and waited until the operational 'go-ahead' was received, then followed an Estonian ferry into Copenhagen early on an April morning.

In the month following the incident, no group or nation had taken responsibility for the attack, and even though Islamic opinion was divided on the affair, word on the streets was that most people in Iran had quietly celebrated the deaths of so many infidels. al-Zaq had been summoned two weeks ago to update basic plan for a much larger strike, and it was this effort he held so tightly in his hands. And now, with the president of the United States having legitimized all of Iran's efforts with his bellicose war-mongering, al-Zaq felt certain that the operational go-ahead was imminent.

"So. What do you make of the American's bravado? Is he a fool?"

"It provides an interesting opportunity, sir. And who can say if he is a fool or not, especially if he suits God's purpose."

"Explain. What opportunity does this present?"

"We launch attacks on their airborne patrols from Syria. The Americans will then rid us of those Sunni parasites once and for all. In the name of Allah, we hit our targets the next day."

"Ah, but doesn't that tip our hand? Won't the infidel then know we had pre-positioned assets prior to the event, prior to their neutralizing Syria . . . and wouldn't that lead them to us?"

"With all due respect, sir, I'm not sure there will be any relevant people in power to ask those questions for days, perhaps weeks. By that time, we and our allies can consolidate our hold over all assets in the region. Western powers will be powerless to coordinate intelligence operations for months, if not years. And without access to resources, their devastated economies will demand that hostilities cease. We can demand they convert to Islam as a concession of our granting them access to oil."

The Director smiled, and al-Zaq suppressed the urge to shiver when he saw the expression on the old man's face. 'Did all men become evil with old age?' he asked himself. "You have the list of targets?"

"Yes, sir." al-Zaq tightly clutched his briefcase unconsciously to his groin again. "Along with Washington and London, the most opportune sites in America are San Diego, Norfolk, New York City, Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. These will devastate their military infrastructure. In Europe: Naples, Marseilles, Toulon, Calais, Ostende, Hamburg and Oslo. Again, these targets will maximize damage to both civilian and military targets. The only question remains: will we have the material on hand to construct the necessary warheads. That is out of my hands." al-Zaq shrugged his shoulders as he looked to his superior for confirmation of his suspicions.

"I have been apprised that we will have twenty such devices, all as before. Your list includes how many targets?"

"Eighteen in all, sir." So the Russians and Chinese were providing the weapons! A devil's bargain, he knew, but an expedient bargain, nonetheless. 

"An embarrassment of riches, eh, Mohammed? Perhaps you can come up with two additional targets?"

"Sir. Of course. Or simply send two more boats either to New York or up the Potomac."

"How long to position the assets?"

"From delivery of warheads, Sir, we will need two weeks to make the necessary modifications to the boats. We will move some vessels by container ship to closer position; say another ten days. Weather is a consideration with assets like these, the time of year, hurricanes, typhoons and the like. Perhaps as soon as seventy days after the order is given. When do you anticipate the order will be given, sir?"

The Director looked cooly at his most trusted operative. "Mohammed, we would like to strike them on their Forth of July, or perhaps their Labor Day. The warheads are even now en-route. The order is given."

______________________________________

Langley, Virginia

CIA Headquarters

Ernest Tucker, the freshly minted head of Central Intelligence, had for the past three decades been head of the Tidewater Baptist Conference and Christ The Redeemer University and Law School, but his most relevant political experience had been as the new president's spiritual advisor for more than a decade. Tucker had no prior military or diplomatic experience to speak of - in fact, he had no experience in government at all save for the fact that he had campaigned vigorously for the new President, but he had over the years been a most outspoken critic of secular humanism's conspiracy to take over America. He wanted nothing more than to restore the spiritual to government, to be responsible for creating a real Christian Republic in America, and he had begged the newly elected President to be allowed to serve as either head of the CIA or as Secretary of State. Polling data showed strong interest in a man of the cloth serving at Central Intelligence, and Tucker made his way to Langley soon after the inauguration, and the rubber stamp confirmation hearings that followed 

There were only seven Democrats left in Congress, so soundly had they been defeated. Tucker was fond of saying that you reap what you sow. Well, the Godless heathens had sown a bitter harvest indeed.

Like all of the incoming cabinet members and heads of major departments, Tucker led prayer services each morning in the central auditorium of the headquarters in Langley, and those career intelligence officers who failed to attend soon found their careers over, just like those who belonged to 'non-approved' religious denominations found their careers at an abrupt end. It was personally satisfying to Tucker to find so many converts finally seeing the light.

On this particular Monday morning, Tucker was listening to an intelligence briefing concerning the operational readiness of the Israeli Air Force to undertake a mission of utmost importance; the briefing was intended to put the finishing touches on a new National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iran's escalating nuclear collaborations with Russia and China, and Israel's mounting concern that Iran would soon use a nuclear device delivered by Russian made ballistic missile on Tel Aviv. The NIE would be used to justify American involvement in support of an Israeli air strike on Iranian nuclear installations. It was hoped this would pull the Russians and Chinese into the conflict. That would fit 'End Time' prophesy quite well.

"So, if I have this right," Tucker said to the assembled military liaison officers, "our involvement should be limited to providing in-flight refueling of Israeli F-16s, as well as AWACs support. We are still in nominal control of Iraqi airspace, and the Saudis have the only other AWACs aircraft in the region. In order to achieve complete surprise, the Saudi aircraft need to be neutralized; does that about sum it up?"

"Yessir," General Oscar Meyer replied. "As you may well remember, Reverend, with the political isolation of Prince Bandar, we can no longer count on Saudi cooperation with any military plans in the Gulf. Only the Saudi's complete antipathy to Iranian hegemony in the region keep them nominally on our side, and this is becoming a day to day thing. We simply can't count on them any longer; they are developing many new financial partners in the EU and Russia, and we have in direct consequence lost most of our influence in the region. And there is the situation in Iraq."

"The president doesn't care about Iraq, General," Tucker said. "They are no longer in play; we control that area of influence for the time being, and that will be sufficient to our needs. Why shouldn't we take part in the raid more directly?"

"Well, Reverend, the refueling operation is simple. The assets are in place, and the operation can be launched with very little advance notice. And frankly, the Israelis should be able to handle the raid itself on their own. We can then hold reserves over the continental United States to stop any Russian airborne attack. Quite frankly, sir, since the end of the Cold War, they've deteriorated quite a bit. Most opinion in the Pentagon is that they will be unable to mount much of an effort."




Dark Passage



"Mr Staley," Tucker said as he turned to address the man in civilian clothes sitting at the far end of the table, "do we have any word on the Chinese warheads?"

"The latest intelligence we've developed is that the Chinese are going to deliver between 10 to 20 five-kiloton warheads to the Iranians within the next week to ten days, possibly sooner. We still have no idea of the means they intend to employ to deliver the warheads, nor have we developed a definitive target list, but as you'll find in the addendum attached to your briefing paper, sir, using fairly straight forward statistical analysis we've developed a list of cities in both the United States and Europe that would most probably be affected. And we have a pretty fair estimate of how long it will take them to position the devices based on how long it took them to hit Copenhagen."

"I see."

"Ah, yessir. We need to assume they'll hit us within the next 60 to 90 days. We should plan on the Israeli attack in 55 days. The Iranians will produce evidence of our involvement almost immediately, we think, which should bring the Chinese into play in fairly short order. Most computer models show Russian involvement developing in fairly rapid progression after that."

"Really? This would be much better than we had hoped for. Is there any action we should take to insure their involvement?"

"Ah, sir, we haven't modeled that set of variables yet. We could work up some operational parameters within a few days, I should think. If you really think it's necessary. At any rate, plans to relocate our core Christian congregations to caves in Missouri and Colorado are in place, and we can begin implementing them with as little as 48 hours notice. Final relocation should take no more than 72 hours. A weeks notice will suffice, Sir."

Tucker looked around the room, at the dedicated men in the middle of their preparations for the coming of their Lord, and he smiled at them. In one operation, infidel and Godless communist would be wiped from this earth for good, and a new world of Christian harmony would emerge from the ruins of the old.

_______________________________________

Cleofus Muldoon pushed his abandoned shopping cart down West 47th Street toward the Hudson River. He stopped dead in his tracks as he came alongside a bar on the shady side of the street and saw a transvestite hooker loitering in the doorway of a seedy bar; he/she ignored him - it was as if he was invisible, which to most New Yorkers a homeless person was - and he/she trolled the streets with his/her eyes looking for the next pervert to accost. Muldoon looked at the hooker for a moment, then shook his head as he shuffled on toward the river. A flea had bitten his leg earlier that week, and the bite had festered. It was painful, and caused him to limp from time to time. He stopped outside the window of a falafel restaurant, and the owner came out a few minutes later and gave him a lamb sandwich and a little salad with yogurt dressing on it. They talked for a while, then both praised Allah before Muldoon walked on toward the river.

Muldoon walked out from the shadowed canyon of skyscrapers and into the light; he looked left toward the old aircraft carrier Intrepid, now a museum, and right toward the marina. Today he chose to walk toward the old aircraft carrier, and try his luck there. Most tourists were pretty tolerant of street people, more so than the local New Yorkers were anyway, and he only needed a few more dollars to afford a fresh vial of insulin for his little girl. He would work the crowds until three or so, then make his way back to the abandoned railway tunnel that he and his daughter called home, while the stock-brokers and fund-managers made their way home to the glass canyons above.

________________________________________

Deke Hayward walked down the ramp at Mendenhall - away from the B-2 Spirit in which he had spent the past eighteen hours; despite the air-conditioning in the aircraft he was drenched in sweat, and his knees were more than a little wobbly. The aircraft he'd flown on last night's mission had developed engine trouble on the return leg over the Italian Alps, and the last three hours had taxed his abilities to the limit as he nursed the crippled B-2 back to England. 

The operational demands of the on-going mission were beginning to take a heavy toll on both pilots and aircraft, and while many missions had their fair share of minor glitches, today's hydraulic failure had very nearly cost his country a cool billion dollars, for such was the current replacement value of his aircraft. The redundancy systems built into the fly-by-wire controls had worked intermittently, well enough anyway to allow partial control of the aircraft, and that had been the margin today that saved his life. Some engineer in Palmdale had really earned his chips today, and Hayward would have dearly loved to buy the man a drink. 

It had been a rough landing, and the old adage that 'any landing you can walk away from is a good landing' no longer applied these days. It was an unsaid truth that it would be far better to die in the flaming wreckage of a B-2 crash than walk away from an aircraft trashed due to pilot error. Billion dollar Level One National Security Assets were taken very seriously, particularly when they carried over one hundred megatons of thermonuclear destructive power. Crashing one was a big 'no-no'!

He walked along the row of parked bombers whistling John Wayne's refrain from The High and The Mighty again, and he wondered what was becoming of the world.

Hayward would spend the next several hours doing his mission de-brief, then the mandatory sauna and massage that followed, but the only thing he was looking forward to was getting back to London later that evening. He was looking forward to going back to Angela's flat in Soho, and, frankly, to getting back deeply into Miss Stuart.

They had been seeing each other for almost six weeks. 'Six weeks!' thought Hayward. Had it only been six goddamn weeks since this insanity began? He had flown nine missions to date, and was scheduled to fly three more in the next ten days - a suicide pace if kept up for too long - and it seemed now that the only thing keeping him sane was Angela Stuart.

He wanted to marry her; of that much he was sure. To do so would irrevocably damage his career, but he didn't really care anymore. The way things were going, he wasn't too sure there was going to be a world worth living in in the not too distant future. The God-Squadders running the White House and the Pentagon seemed to have gone around the bend as far as he was concerned. The proposed mission to support an Israeli air strike deep inside Iran troubled him deeply. Though operational security was as tight as anything he had ever seen, he knew the proposed strike was due to happen sometime in the next two weeks. He only hoped he wouldn't be flying a mission the same day. That would get sticky.

He whistled again as he thought of that.

__________________________________

Horace Morning-Star sat with his wife and son and daughter around their campfire; they said little after they watched the Seven Sisters setting in the western sky. Before the Scorpion reached its zenith low in the southern sky, Morning-Star told his family the old story about the white man once again, and how they would bring an end to this cycle of human history.

He told them that almost two hundreds years before, when buffalo had stilled roamed the vast oceanic prairie of their former lands in herds so vast as to outnumber even the stars, his fathers had learned from the Red Eagle that the coming of the white man would bring a great poison to Mother Earth, and that though Mother Earth would fight the white man, she would fail. In the end it would not matter, the fathers had learned, for when a comet appeared in the Seven Sisters the white man would start the last of his great wars, and only a few people might survive.

The father's final bit of wisdom concerned the Scorpion. As the almost full moon grew near the red star in the scorpion's body, the star would suddenly appear to grow huge and angry. The Eagle's arrow would fly from the Seven Sisters not long after, and the time of man would fall from the sky like fire, never to return.

On this cool June night, as the moon arced across the sky toward Antares, Horace Morning-Star watched as the red star in the Scorpion suddenly grew so bright in the night sky that his eyes burned in pain, and he looked away. He saw his family staring at the sky with terror in their eyes, and he felt suddenly very old as he saw the beloved landscape of his Montana homelands bathed in a blood-red light.

After a moment, he turned and sang to the sky.

_____________________________________

Christopher Miller sat in his class at the New Day Christian Academy, listening to the man talk about the Star that had just 'gone Supernova', as he called it. None of what the man said made any sense. Light years? A universe billions or years old? The man was obviously a liar and a fraud; the universe was created seven thousand years ago. Mankind was only four thousand years old. Stars didn't evolve; they had been created, just like Adam and Eve and all the other animals on Earth.

Though Miller was only twelve years old, he knew the difference between a world ruled by God and a world ruled by men. Men lied. They ignored truths that were so self-evident that it was silly to even bother listening to them. These frauds kept on seeking 'the truth' through science, through a 'rational discourse' they claimed would lead man from superstition to true enlightenment. But this man up here today! He was something else!

Finally his teacher got up and dismissed the astronomer, and then talked to the class about needing to be polite, to at least pretend to listen even when disagreeing about something, and finally, most importantly, of knowing scripture well enough to expose the unbelievers lies for what they were: the work of Satan.

Before class let out for the weekend, Miller's teacher talked once again about the special summer trip they would soon be taking to visit caves in Missouri, and all of the special projects each of them had to carry out before they left on their adventure.


_________________________________________

Newspapers around the world considered the supernova event - by and large - an ill omen. Christian pundits told their readership that it was a sure sign that the end times were near, while clerics in Mecca and Tehran told their slightly less scientifically inclined audiences that the event heralded the final ascent of Islam, an event that would usher in an era of peace heretofore unknown in human history.

The President of the United States listened to his spiritual advisors and concurred that the event was confirmation of their intention to trigger Armageddon. Plans were proceeding, indeed, were taking shape more quickly than expected, to place more than two million true believers in man made caves. The logistics were easy when the national guard and prison inmates had been employed to do most of the work. Livestock, seeds and educational materials were being transported this week; next week livestock and mobile medical facilities would be prepositioned.

Deke Hayward looked at Antares and marveled once again at the thought that the light tickling his eyes had begun it's journey 604 years ago, and he enjoyed teaching Angela about the vast distances that marked locations in the universe. It was a fantastic time to be alive, he told her, fantastic to live in an era when so much knowledge was so readily available to almost anyone with the desire to learn. It was a era, he said, marked by the almost pure democratic experience of knowledge, a pure realization of a Jeffersonian ideal, yet it wasn't lost on either of them that the era was concurrently marked by an almost irresistible urge to embrace the irrational world of mysticism. It was as if the more powerful the evidence became for the absurdity of many of the world's religions claims, he told Stuart, the more it seemed people anchored their beliefs in those very absurdities. It was, he had said more than once to her, all the proof needed that humanity was a dead end species unworthy of the gifts bestowed on them by God. 

She listened, she understood, she agreed, and she had trouble understanding the contradictory impulses that seemed at war inside this man. Was he really the living embodiment of modern man? Educated in the ways science, of philosophy and ethics and yes, war; and if so, why had the religious impulse remained so deeply ingrained in him? Was there some biological need that only religion could address? Was it an addiction? A matter of neural stimulation, as so many psycho biologists now thought? A psycho pathology, as Freudians and others of their ilk still maintained after almost one hundred years?

War and God. Why did the mark almost every human endeavor? Why did religious moderates continue to make excuses for the increasingly bizarre excesses of their extremist brethren? Was it that in accepting the eccentricities of the extremists among them that the moderates maintained a hold over their own tenuous beliefs?

Stuart really didn't know anymore. She had faced these questions as a young girl, and confronted them for the first time when she had gone to America to study journalism first at Georgetown, and later at Harvard.

Religions was to Americans a bifurcated idea, at once a lugubrious burden, and at other times a cause for real joy. Americans embraced technology, and ignored the foundations of science that had enabled their material progress. Evangelicals, first in Houston, and later throughout the South, advanced the theory that material wealth was a sign of Godliness, prosperity a sign that Americans, as a unified people, were favored by God to extend the Kingdom of Heaven once again. It was the newest incarnation of Manifest Destiny. 

Americans began to market Christianity the way they had almost everything else, and soon it became the latest 'me too-must have' icon of upward mobility, and with the wealth infused by all of these new, wealthy converts, Evangelicals in concert with a conservative political network long thwarted by New Deal ideologues, began the long business of destroying the social network built up over almost forty years - from Roosevelt's ascension in 1932 to LBJs abdication in 1968 - and began constructing a new Christian Utopia on the ruins. They systematically destroyed state university system in California, turned it into a trade school for the electronics industry, and using that experience as a springboard, began to systematically devalue the teaching of first History, then modern theories underlying biology. Religious curricula began to replace secular teachings, often disguised as a more inclusive mainstream secularism. Liberals, forever loathe to appear counter-inclusive, fell into the trap and failed to stand up for their ideas. The Bush-Cheney-Rove triumvirate simply executed the coup de gras and began the systematic elimination of all vestiges of New Deal liberalism from government. Remnants of the Democratic opposition were outnumbered and tactically boxed in at every turn, until after the legislative capitulations of 2007 left the Democratic Party both morally and financially bankrupt. Liberals increasingly left the country, further consolidating the Evangelicals hold on power. The 2008 elections, long hoped to mark the resurgence of progressive liberalism in America, left a totally humiliated Democratic Party and saw a radically energized religious base move on into all areas of government.

Stuart saw the marks of this conflict in Hayward. He simply could not acknowledge the rational foundations of his understanding of the world; he would fall into an easy mysticism whenever a moral problem too difficult to grapple with presented itself. When something "bad" happened, it was "God's will" - it happened "for a purpose". This made life easier to understand, there was no need for society to take responsibility for deteriorating social conditions because everything was happening for a reason, the poor and the inform were simply getting what they deserved. They were reaping what they had sown. The wealthy had no overriding obligation to help the poor, no social responsibility to care for the sick, they had only to amass wealth to prove their Godliness.

It was a simple, childish calculus, and it was America. A country that had once been a beacon of hope to the world had, in the end, become just another third rate theocracy. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people had withered and ultimately been killed by material excess and a deliberately inculcated ignorance. Americans had no idea what they had lost. They were comfortable and by and large well fed, and that was all that mattered. 

Despite these contradictions, Stuart felt a real attachment to Hayward. He made her feel special, as there was an excessive manliness about him that people noticed, and respected. She basked in his miliary glory, for he was by now almost an international hero. His news conferences were televised globally; his descriptions of the missions flown by American pilots made the front pages of daily newspapers everywhere. People recognized him in restaurants; strangers paid his restaurant bills, sent him tickets to plays; women wrote him constantly, sent him pictures, asked him to marry them. They made love to him, idolized him, made of him the fatted calf, and Stuart enjoyed the irony of his discomfort.

They talked of love and life, of making babies and building a home together. All the things two people in love do when the future looks limitless to them. He told her that marrying her, a foreign national, would mean the end of his flying career, and he told her that didn't matter to him anymore. He looked at America, and the raging intolerance and blind faith and he knew in his heart that something terribly wrong had happened. He felt his love for her taking over every aspect of his life, and it surprised Stuart to admit, if only to herself, that she was beginning to feel the same all consuming love for this conflicted warrior.

He told her that the coming week to ten days would see some heavy activity on his part, and her reporter's instinct kicked in and she listened intently while he described the mission profiles he was scheduled to fly next week. She shuddered when she heard an veiled inference to an Israeli raid on Iran, and he warned her with his eyes to never mention that outside their flat, and she nodded her assent, understood immediately the implications for both Hayward's career and the lives of untold people on the ground and in the air. 

Then she dropped her own bombshell; she told him about the President's scheduled address to the world next week, and of her assignment to cover this special event live, from the White House. He stiffened at that, worried that she would be away from him for too long. Worried that things would spiral out of control while she was away from him, and that he could not protect her.

"Do you have to go, baby?"

"Oh, Deke, you know I do. This is big stuff, the world feels like it's running out of room, like suddenly we're running out of the very air we breathe." She watched him drift away for a moment, then held his face in her hands and kissed him.

" It's my job, you know!" she said with a playful pout on her face. Then she kissed him again.

"I love you, baby," he told her.

"Do you, indeed?" They held on to each other with a violent intensity that shook them both. 

"There's so much we need to know about one another . . ." he said, though his voice trailed off again.

"And so little, what? Time?"

They walked out on the balcony of her Soho flat and stared at the fiercely glowing eye that now defined the southern sky, and they looked up at the frighteningly large reddish-yellow smear that now more than ever before defined the scorpion's body. She shuddered at the sight.




Dark Passage



"What's wrong, baby?" he said. "You getting cold?"

"No, it's not that. Deke? Are you, can you, well, I don't know how to ask you this, but do you ever get the impression that events are being driven toward a conclusion. That events aren't just happening randomly?"

"You mean, like God is behind all of these things happening?"

"No, Deke, I mean could it be that exactly the opposite is happening. That there is a conspiracy somewhere, and somehow people are directing events towards an unnatural conclusion. Religious people, perhaps alarmed that there influence is waning, or perhaps people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to prop up their belief systems by constructing a set of self-fulfilling prophesies."

"I guess it must seem that way sometimes, baby. It's a confusing world."

"It's a world gone mad, Deke."

He chuckled at that. His religious moderation simply could not allow for a world view that saw evil triumphant in God's name. God simply wouldn't allow it. "That's not God's fault, Angela," he told her as he held her close to his side.

"And what if there's no God, Deke. Then what is all this suffering for?"

"You got me." He looked from Antares to Angela, and he saw the huge, baleful star reflected in her eyes. The sight unsettled him. "I don't know, really, Angela. If there's no God, does anything, anywhere really matter?"

"Life matters, Deke. Life for it's own sake. And suffering matters, when there are so many things mankind could do to alleviate suffering. Leading a life aimed toward producing good - that matters, Deke."

"But how do you define good in the absence of God. It's impossible!"

"Really? Do you have to know God in order to know that causing needless pain and suffering is wrong? Are you telling me that I have to know God in order to understand that my actions are good? You can't really believe that, Deke?"

He listened to her words, and his initial impulse was to withdraw from her, run from her and her apostasy, but he caught himself, fell back on the love he felt for her. "I don't know, Angela. It's what I've always believed. I know it doesn't make sense sometimes, but there are other times when it's the only thing in the world that does make sense."

She took his hand and held it to her mouth and kissed his fingers.

All thought of God, she could see it now most clearly, simply clouded the human mind from rational understanding. Something old and primitive was roused from an ancient sleep when God was mentioned, and the mind rebelled at the internal conflict that could only be resolved by faith. As she watched Deke fall into the poverty of his contradictions, she felt sorry for him, for his country, for all the blindness that threatened to bring perpetual night to this world, the darkness of ignorance that even now threatened once again to consume all life on this planet once again.

What was it Carl Sagan had called this raging contradiction within the human psyche? The Demon Haunted World?

_____________________________________

al-Zaq finished supervising placement of the last Chinese warhead in the huge lead keel that would be soon be bolted back onto the fifty-one foot Beneteau sailboat. Two of the white-hulled boats were still in the aircraft hangar in Croatia where the work was being carried out; seventeen boats had already been prepared and departed for their targets in Europe and the eastern United States. These final three would be moved by containership to Hawaii, where they would be off-loaded and set sail for California and Washington state. 

al-Zaq checked that the extra lead shielding around the weapon was fully intact and secured in-place, and that the electronic jamming device designed to further shield the plutonium from radiologic detection was in place and activated. The last thing he did before the keel was bolted back on the hull proper was to arm the remote detonation circuit; after that was done he kept watch on the crew while the keel bolts were aligned and the hull lowered down on the 3m 5200 saturated keel to hull joint. Men inside reattached and bedded the bolts, then laid down yet another lead shield, which was then fibre-glassed into place. The joint would be allowed to set-up overnight before the boat was moved, but al-Zaq knew his job now was almost finished. He would gather the crews together to go over navigational details one last time, but soon he would have little more to do than wait for the appointed hour.

When the work crew came out of the boat, they were gunned down. He hated it, but it had to be done. God would understand.

_____________________________________________

Cleofus Muldoon walked down the subway tunnel with his daughter; she was doing better today with the fresh insulin he had been able to buy that morning, and after he got her bedded down in their home near the abandoned subway tunnel, he would return to 47th Street to panhandle more money for dinner. 

He saw a rat skulking in the shadows, and this surprised him. 

He thought that all the rats had been killed and eaten long ago. 

Maybe he wouldn't have to go beg for their supper tonight after all.

____________________________________________

Entropy is often defined as a degree of disorder or randomness in a system. It affects electronic systems as well as human systems; it's impact is unpredictable, and the effect it has on developing chaos is equally unpredictable. When entropy is taken into account by war-planners, all outcomes presumed to be within expected ranges of probability become elusive. This is euphemistically called the 'fog of war', but to the degree such unpredictability can be factored into calculations of this magnitude, the results are somewhat predictable nonetheless: the boys with the biggest and baddest weapons usually prevail. 

Usually.

____________________________________________

"Spirit 2-9 alpha, taxi to position x-ray and hold."

"Two nine alpha, roger," Hayward replied to the controller in the tower. He went over the engine instrument screen one last time; all temps and pressures looked nominal. The nav screen showed the exact route his B-2 would follow over East Anglia and the Channel as he made his way over France for Turkey. He would meet up with the first KC-10 Extender to refuel out over the eastern Med , then move in to loiter over Mecca. Three F-22 Raptors would remain nearby the entire time he was over Saudi Arabia tonight. This was a new twist, one that had become necessary after the scare caused by fighters being scrambled from Syria three weeks ago. It seemed the flames of pan-Arab nationalism had been stoked as never before by the continued over-flights, and there was now concerted talk of a Pan-Arab summit to discuss countering the threat posed by the United States. Russia was, somewhat predictably, rumored to be behind these nascent talks.

Hayward advanced the throttles and turned onto the active runway, then braked once again after the aircraft lined up with the center of the runway. The sun was setting in the western sky, though it was barely visible through scattered thunderstorm that had passed over the airfield not an hour ago. Steam rose from the concrete around the idling B-2 and hovered in the still air before it was sucked into the air intakes and incinerated.

"Two-nine alpha, clear for take off. Contact departure on 243.9. Good luck tonight."

"Two-niner, roger 243.9, and good night." The co-pilot advanced the throttles to their stops while Hayward held the aircraft in place with brakes, then he released these and the ponderously fueled aircraft began to accelerate smoothly down the runway. The Captain flying with him tonight called out speeds and at "Rotate!" Hayward pulled back smoothly on the stick, and the aircraft lifted gently from the concrete and began to climb quietly into the night sky. 

"Positive rate of climb," the co-pilot called out.

"Gear up."

"Gear up. 300 AGL."

"Flaps to seven."

"Seven, roger. Speed one-nine-five. 750 AGL."

"Flaps to three."

"Three, roger. Speed two two zero, 1500 AGL."

"Clean it up and give me eighty percent EP, set your bug to thirty five thousand and heading to one four zero."

"Thirty five and one four zero," the co-pilot echoed.

Hayward's immediate world was bathed in the pale red glow of instrument lights and navigation displays. As the heavy bomber climbed over southeast Britain, he looked off toward Cambridge to the right, and Canterbury far off on the distant horizon and just now dead ahead. So many cathedrals, so many people worshiping God, going to war in His name. He held the stick lightly in his hand, felt the aircraft respond to his slightest touch, and wondered what difference there was between his flight tonight and an English Crusaders long journey to Jerusalem almost a millennia ago. The details of going to war had changed, certainly, but how different, really, was the impetus. How constant was the hate that drove men to kill in the name of God.

Passing through thirty thousand feet, Hayward engaged the autopilot. He watched Calais slip under the port side of the long wing, and not too long passed before Geneva slipped by under the starboard side.

"Pressure on two is climbing a little," his co-pilot said.

Hayward punched up the exhaust gas temp screen for engine two, then the oil pressure readout. It looked like a minor glitch, not bad enough to call an abort. "Throttle back on two and three. Set it to, say, forty-five percent. Let's watch it for a little bit and see what it does."

"Forty five it is," the captain said as he throttled back the two inboard engines.

The plane bucked a little as it made it's way into the turbulent air rising over the Alps, and Hayward looked down a few minutes later at the jewel-like lights of Zermatt as they twinkled in the deepening night while Two Nine Alpha slipped by silently through the night sky - unnoticed - above them. For some reason he thought of the Matterhorn, not down there but in Anaheim. Riding the Goddamned Matterhorn bobsled ride at Disneyland. Sitting in a bomber riding over the Alps toward the Middle East - hauling two hundred gigatons of death - and here he was, thinking about Goddamned Disneyland! Taking kids he didn't have to an amusement park, with a woman who might or might not marry him someday.

When this is all over, Hayward said to himself as he drifted down the byways of memory, he was going to go back there. He was going to make this happen!

"Spirit two nine alpha, this is Looking Glass Zulu Bravo."

"Two nine alpha, Looking Glass; go ahead," Hayward said as he toggled the transit button and spoke into his headset.

"Two nine alpha. Case Zebra, repeat, Case Zebra. Authenticate Omega One."

"Two nine alpha, receive Case Zebra, will authenticate Omega One." The co-pilot reached into his flight case and pulled out a compact flash card and slipped it into the slot on his side of the radio console, then keyed in the days authentication code, which was Omega. A list of options popped up on the little screen above his left knee, and he scrolled down to Zebra. He read a moment, then whistled.

"What's the news? Good or bad?" Hayward said.

"Guess it depends on your point of view."

"Put it on my screen."

"Right."

Hayward looked at his screen. EWO EWO EWO flashed across the top of the display. EWO stood for emergency war orders, and was never used, even in readiness drills, unless deep shit was anticipated. He scrolled on to the main body of the text message.

'Joint American-Israeli air strike on nuclear facilities in Iran scheduled to commence at 2200hours Zulu. Anticipate hostile response from regional and supra-regional powers. A/C operating in theater contact Zulu Bravo on designated frequency. Set EWO IFF as per operational briefing.'

"Well, ain't this just ducky!" Hayward said into his oxygen mask, and he leaned over to dial up a large scale map display of the region that was being actively downloaded from the AWACs. Nothing airborne over Israel yet. He looked at his watch: 2145 hours Zulu, or Greenwich Mean Time. He punched more numbers into the display and the KC-10 they were scheduled to refuel from lit up, westbound out of Turkey, scheduled rendevous time in ninety minutes. The Iranian raid would be about ten minutes shy of hostile airspace about the time Hayward's B-2 tanked up, which put him over Mecca about time word of the raid would go public. Everything would be fine as long as the Saudis kept a lid on things. That was, Hayward knew, one Hell of a longshot.

_________________________________

Cleofus Muldoon walked along the sidewalk above the 47th Street Marina, looking down on the sailboats and huge motor-yachts that dotted this billionaires landscape. He stopped and looked at a woman eating dinner on the fantail lounge of a yacht that must have been, by Muldoon's quite inexperienced eye, as long as a football field. She was chastising an oriental maid, telling the young girl that the shrimp were 'Just awful . . . not nearly enough vermouth on them!' and that the girl should 'get out of my sight this instant!'

Muldoon could smell the meal from the sidewalk . . . it smelled just like his idea of heaven.

The woman looked up at him. "What are you staring at, young man!? Fuck-off!!!"

Muldoon turned and shuffled away from the boat and the foul-mouthed woman. The sore on his leg was spreading, making it harder to walk, and despite the heat of the August afternoon he felt chilled. He had collected almost three dollars, enough to buy some cheeseburgers tonight if he felt like splurging on his daughter, which he almost always did.

_________________________________

Hayward took the stick after the co-pilot had worked the jet up behind the KC-10, a converted DC-10 airliner that now served as a flying gas station, and he inched the B-2 forward through turbulence behind the huge jets, listening to the boom operator giving readouts and instructions as the B-2 closed on the re-fueling drogue.

"Three feet, two, one . . . contact! Positive pressure."

"Two nine alpha, fill 'er up."

"Roger that, colonel. I'd get the bugs on the windshield, sir, but it's a little cold out."

"That figures. MacDougal? Is that you up there?"

"Yes sir, colonel!"

"I figure we're gonna need about eighty five tonight."

"No problem, sir."

"Ah, two nine alpha, this is the front office. We got an EWO a while ago, told us to orbit here in case you need to bug outta Dodge City in a hurry. Same IP. We can hold here about six more."

"Good to hear there'll be someone out here tonight."

Hayward concentrated on holding the B-2 steady in the roaring slipstream, his eyes squinting at his heads-up-display and the luminous infrared markings on the refueling drogue. Lasers read distances and these figures popped up on the HUD with lightning precision. He felt sweat forming in the small of his back, and his shoulder muscles grew stiff and fiery hot as he worked the stick back and forth, left-right, up-down.

"Colonel, comin' up on 85 in 30."

"Roger. Give me the callout."

"Yessir. Fifteen . . . ah . . . ten . . . five hundred, and ready to break pressure, three, two, one and break-break-break!"

Hayward pushed down and left while the KC-10 climbed and broke right, and they were free. He nudged the autopilot into a slow climb and dialed in the new heading for the next set of coordinates while the co-pilot called in their thank yous and passed frequencies for the possible rendevous later that night. The live feed from the AWACs showed the joint American/Israeli strike force climbing eastbound, now about forty miles south of Baghdad, so still about thirty minutes from penetrating Iranian airspace. The TACAN now put Mecca about thirty seven minutes away from their B-2.

"Zulu Bravo - two nine alpha."

"Two nine go," Hayward replied.

"Two nine, we got two Saudi AWACs headed up, and, uh, stand by one . . . looks like a bunch of Eagles headed up too. Make their heading zero four zero, climbing through ten right now, speed five-fifty."

"Zulu bravo, does it look like there are any Mainstays out?" Mainstays were older Soviet era AWACs aircraft still used by the Russians. They weren't state of the art, but they were effective platforms nonetheless. If they turned up this was going to turn into a cluster-fuck.

"Uh, two nine, negative track on those birds at this time, and very little activity, period. Not even commercial stuff. Got an Iran Air 747 SP tracking outbound from Tehran for Moscow, and that's it."

"Two nine roger, having trouble getting the feed over Saudi. Check your signal, please." Hayward was sure the operator on the E3 was nervous and had forgotten to download the feed to his B-2. Sure enough a moment later a screen on his panel flickered and jumped, then filled with a overview of Saudi airspace. Looked like two E3Bs and fourteen F-15s. Another E3 appeared on his screen, this one headed almost directly toward his estimated position when he would cross into Saudi airspace. Seven Eurofighter Typhoons popped onto his screen seconds later, followed by another seven five minutes later.

"Ah, two nine alpha here. Zulu actual, you watching those Typhoons?"

A tired voice came on: "Roger, two nine alpha."

"Ah, two nine, what do we have up tonight?"

The voice this time was younger, less sure of herself: "Couple of F-22s at your ten and two, fifty out, another at your six, three back. Got a ready alert on the Nimitz in the Red Sea, F/A-18s, and of course some friendlies on stand-by outside of Tel Aviv."

"Ah, Zulu control here, looks like a light-up and sortie forming east of Cairo, and a whole shitload of activity around Damascus. The Reagan is turning into the wind off Bahrain, say they've got some surface action headed there way."

"Two nine alpha," the two star commanding the AWACs said, "suggest you head upstairs now."

"Two nine, concur. We're going up now, and active on ECM." The electronic warfare operator behind Hayward began jamming radar and readying more active countermeasures in case they were needed. He looked at the tactical display again, saw that the Israeli raid was now over the target area and unopposed, and that aircraft were coming up from Syria, Egypt and Jordan, as well as Saudi Arabia. Most of these aircraft were forming up and heading for Israel; Hayward doubted this war would last seven days. Maybe seven hours, but more likely seven minutes.

All but one group of Saudi Typhoons maintained their intercept course towards two nine alpha's projected course toward Mecca. It was time to call National Command Authority and let them figure out what they wanted to do if the Saudis came up after him. It was almost a statistical impossibility that they could find the B-2, but the fact that they were trying to was a pretty big signal that a sea-change in relations between the United States and the Arab world had just occurred.

_____________________________________

The White House

Washington, D.C.

"Mister President," Admiral Leah Hastings of the Joint Chiefs said. "Missions Two Nine Alpha is set to penetrate Saudi airspace in five minutes. AWACs reports a heavy concentration of Saudi fighter aircraft headed toward this aircraft, and the aircraft commander wants clarification of rules of engagement."

"If they make a hostile gesture, knock 'em down. Advise the B-2 that on the first sign of hostile intent, he is to take his aircraft to his primary target and take it out, then proceed to his secondary and take that one out, too!" The president was clearly distracted by this annoyance, as he had for the past hour been focused completely on the Iranian raid.

Word was now coming in that three Mk 94 Bunker Buster nuclear warheads had apparently penetrated the weapons complex, as a huge amount of secondary radiation was beginning to appear on live satellite imagery. The raiders had bypassed Iranian airfields and naval facilities while inbound, and had met with only token interference as they ran back for the Gulf, but word of the attack had already spread to the other countries in the region, and initial political response was savage in it's condemnation of the attack. The President watched the same AWACs feed that Hayward was watching in his B-2, and he smiled when he saw the counterattack against Israel forming up. This could not be going better, he said to himself. All of his acolytes had been transferred to their caves in the Midwest and under the Rockies. Soon he would leave as well.




Dark Passage



_________________________________________

"Two nine alpha, suggest you turn left to one-three-zero degrees, climb to angels eight five."

"Two nine alpha, roger one three zero and eighty five." Hayward dialed the heading bug on his flight director to 130 degrees and entered the new altitude setting on the alphanumeric display by his right knee. He looked at his number two engine once again, but it appeared to be holding good pressure and temp right now. 

"Colonel? Ready for weapons release check-list."

"Right." Hayward felt a lurch in his chest when he heard the co-pilot say those words, but they both responded with robotic precision as the captain read through each item on the check-list and the various release protocols were checked-off.

The B-2 carried two five hundred gigaton weapons mounted on the latest Phoenix III scram jet missiles. These missiles would deliver the weapons to their designated targets at speeds approaching mach eleven; they were for all intents and purposes unstoppable once launched, as their flight time was typically well under thirty seconds. Hayward glanced at the tactical display, and observed that US Navy jets were now northbound over the Red Sea, one group coming up on the Saudi AWACs, and another larger group shadowing the Saudi Typhoons. Egyptian Mig 29s were angling toward the Navy jets closing on the Typhoons, and Hayward blanched when he saw a cluster of Israeli F-16s and F-15s climbing out over the Sinai toward the Egyptian aircraft.

This was beginning to look like World War III, Hayward said to himself.

"Two nine alpha, you are now weapons free," the AWACs controller said.

"Two nine alpha, understood," Hayward said. "We're starting our run now."

"Zulu Bravo actual here, Colonel. Good luck and God be with you."

"Yessir," Colonel Deke Hayward said. "And to you and your crew, sir." He looked at his tactical display one more time: the Egyptian and Israeli fighters were engaged now, and the Navy F/A 18s were taking on the Saudi Typhoons. His Raptors remained on station at their pre-assigned guard-points as the four aircraft in his command hurtled through the night toward Mecca.

_____________________________________

Angela Stuart walked down the First Class Jetway toward the Boeing 747-800 that would carry her to Washington, D.C. tonight. She was blissfully unaware of events unfolding in the skies over the Sinai, just as she and everyone else in London was unaware of the fifty one foot Beneteau sailboat that was even at that moment passing by the Greenwich Observatory on it's way to the quay across from the Tower of London. She took her seat, number 3 A on this flight, and the First Class Steward came by a moment later and offered her Champagne and a small salmon souffle. She plugged her laptop in and signed into her BBC account while she nibbled at the souffle. It was delicious.

There was still no mention of events taking place in the skies over Iran or the Sinai, none even as the Jetway retracted and the huge Boeing was pushed back from the gate at Terminal Three. The pilot came on and advised all passengers to stow their laptops and cell phones as there was a gap in traffic and they had clearance for an immediate take-off. The new composite Boeing raced down the taxiways and turned smartly on to the active runway and began to accelerate powerfully as the jet began it's run for the sky.

Oddly enough, departures were taking off to the east that night, and Stuart watched the familiar landscape of her home city slide by below . . . The River Thames, Big Ben and the London Eye . . . all the landmarks of her home . . . all of the landmarks that had stood up to time and wars . . . Normans, the Spanish Armadas, Napoleon, Hitler . . . all had tried, few were successful at breaching the Channel that had protected Britain for all of human history . . .

And a minute after take off the Boeing began to turn gently to the right, to the south, and begin its climbing arc out and over the Atlantic. The seat belt light remained on, but the pilot came on and advised that it was alright to hook up laptops again. Stuart reached under her seat, turned away from the window as she did, and so was spared the blinding flash that rendered twelve hundred years of history to ash in the blink of an eye.

_________________________________________

Cleofus Muldoon walked with his sack of hamburgers past the 47th Street Marina, and he looked down on the rich woman in the huge motor yacht again as she continued to order her hapless maid about. He stopped and looked at her again, but his eye slipped from this scene to another equally as perplexing.

A brother Muslim was setting out his prayer rug in the cockpit of a large sailboat; the boat had pulled into the slip next to the foul-mouthed woman just minutes before, and even the woman stopped berating her servant when she saw the Arab gentlemen praying on mats that faced the eastern horizon.

Something grabbed Muldoon in his gut, some distant, unknown voice called out to him, and he began hurrying along as fast as he could toward his home, toward his abandoned subway tunnel and his daughter. He felt the hand of God on his back, pushing him along, and soon he scrambled down an abandoned strip of scaffolding and still further down onto an old subway line that disappeared into the inky darkness of decay, and he ran as hard as his legs would allow toward the cubby-hole in a brick wall that he called home. 

He could just make out a candle in an old soup can just ahead, and he heard his daughter's cough and was filled with love for the girl. She was truly the light that lit his home each night. He ran toward her as fast as he could in the darkness, ran as hard as he could until the concussion of the first blast knocked his feet out from under him. A hurricane developed and sucked the air from the shaft, and the candle went out. 

The roaring noise seemed to go on forever.

______________________________________

Hayward moved the targeting marker on his screen to the GPS coordinates stored in his computer, and hit the 'enable lock' button. A soft, low-pitched warning alarm sounded, and Hayward moved his finger to the launch button. He hesitated a moment, then pressed it.

The missile bay door opened within the span of a human heartbeat and the Phoenix III missile was ejected forward on it's launch arm even faster, followed by a thudding sound and the door slamming shut a millisecond later. The scram jet missile dropped away for a few seconds, then arced up and away as three pencil thin lines of super-heated blue plasma flared out the exhaust ports in an elaborate helix shape that seemed to stretch back toward infinity. When the missile reached 150,000 feet the scram jet kicked in and the missile nosed over and simply disappeared inside a glaring blue flash over the southern horizon. Seconds later the southern horizon turned into a glowing storm of sunlight and writhing clouds that climbed into the night sky.

Hayward toggled the autopilot and changed course for Kuwait City as he watched the spreading cloud wipe away the watchful eye that had once been Antares.

________________________________________

Secret Service agents hustled the president out of the Oval Office toward the waiting Marine helicopter; they literally tossed him up the ramp into the arms of another agent. As soon as the door slammed shut the pilot lifted the collective and the helicopter rose into the clinging evening air and dipped toward the northeast, toward Andrews Air Force Base. The helicopter arced across the Mall, over the Smithsonian and towards the Potomac. The Republican Guardsman turned when he heard the noise of the helicopter, and he smiled when he recognized the it as the Presidents. He waited until he was sure it was headed right for him, then, just as the helicopter was passing over the Gangplank Marina and the sailboat on which he stood, he detonated the warhead below as he smiled at God's foresight.

_________________________________________ 

"Two nine alpha. Looking Glass Zulu Bravo to two nine alpha, how do you read?"

"Ah, two nine alpha here, we'll need to get back to you in a second. It's getting kinda busy up here."

"Affirmative, two nine alpha, that second group at your four o'clock appears to be another group of Russian Sukhois. Probably three-fives. Backfires have hit five airfields in Iraq, and intel indicates that heavy troop transports are headed south for Iraq and Saudi Arabia out of both Russia and China. Indications are that we have nuclear detonations in several major US cities on the eastern seaboard. Some reports of detonations in California. Command authority wants to re-task you to a more strategic target. Report when ready to download."

"Two nine, roger. We're climbing out to the northwest, will advise when we get clear of these bandits."

"Roger, two nine alpha, Recommend you come to heading three-five-zero, maintain angels niner zero. Your ten o'clock Raptor is down, repeat, escort two niner bravo one is down. Ah, wait one . . . ah, two nine alpha, now recommend you come to two niner five and go active ECM. Three, repeat three Sukhoi three-fives turning in on your six o'clock at range one seven five, angels fifty five."

"Two niner alpha turning to two niner five, roger. Where are those F-22s that went to Iran?"

"Two niner alpha, they're refueling out over the Med. If they can break free, uh, will vector in; ah, recommend change course back to three-five-zero. Are you jamming?"

"Three-five-zero. Affirmative, active ECM."

Hayward watched as the Russian Sukhoi 35s continued to chase a phantom radar return that led them due west, away from his B-2, and he gave a silent sigh of relief as he shifted his butt in his seat. His lower back and thighs ached, and he could feel sweat building up in his helmet. The oxygen mask was digging into the skin around his nose, and the dry air was causing his nostrils to burn. Other than the world going crazy, Hayward thought, everything was just fine and dandy! SNAFU, wasn't that what they used to call it. Situation normal - all fucked up!

"Two nine alpha, National Command Authority advises Russian ICBM launch in progress. No target data at this time."

"Received." With that news, Hayward felt dead inside. He shook his head, tried to clear the haze that enveloped him . . . 

"Colonel?" his co-pilot asked. "You doin' alright?"

"Yeah, Bill, fine." Hayward clinched his jaw and ground his teeth for a moment, then focused on his heads-up-display and the vectors being fed by the AWACs. This was no time to wax philosophical he said to himself. This was what he had trained for all his life . . . this was his destiny . . .

"Two nine alpha. NCA advises Trident launch on targets in Russia and China, and US ICBM launch is in progress. Russian launch confirmed, targeting indicated in continental United States and Western Europe. Stand-by one . . . ah, NCA has new targeting now, two nine alpha. New target is Tehran."

"Two nine alpha, received. Entering target data to set on receive."

"Two nine alpha, sending - NOW."

"Two nine alpha, data set received and entered. Get me a rough heading if you can as soon as possible."

"Two nine alpha; say fuel state."

"Two niner, about 85 and five hours."

"Roger, two niner. Come right to zero-zero-five, rendevous with tanker Zebra Two-three in seven five miles."

"Two niner alpha to double-O five. Gotta transponder for me?" Hayward didn't like this at all; it was too busy up here . . . too busy to be tanking up now. The route just fed into computer would take them right over Baghdad and straight into Iranian airspace - directly across the route Russian transports would be flying south toward Saudi Arabia. It was a recipe for disaster, but all of a sudden it hit him . . . there probably wasn't going to be much left to go home to anyway. He scanned the instruments automatically now, it was almost as if he was dead already. One more job to do. One more job . . . before I sleep . . . 

"Two niner, tanker ident Zebra twenty-three on1400, IFF ident triple 3."

"Roger."

The cockpit filled with a howling engine alarm; Hayward looked hurriedly at the readouts for engine two. "Shut it down! Now!" he called out to the co-pilot, but the engine fire alarm went off, followed by a hydraulic pressure alarm.

"Two nine alpha, read a heat bloom in your area, and some debris?!"

Hayward ignored the controller as he and the co-pilot worked to get the fire out and stabilize power in the remaining three engines.

"Two niner alpha, how do you read?"

The B-2 was dumping heat into the atmosphere, and he could only guess what kind of radar signature the exploding fan blades were leaving as they trailed away from B-2. "Two niner, yeah, we've just lost our number two engine . . . think we threw some blades . . ." Hayward looked at the tactical display. Yes, the Sukhois had been alerted by their own AWACs and were vectoring on a new intercept course. ". . . You got any word on friendly a/c in the neighborhood. We're not going to be able to hold this altitude, and we'll be better off down in the weeds after we tank up."

"Roger two niner. Recommend you decrease altitude rapidly to flight level 15. There are a couple of Marine EA-6Bs running hot this way from Aviano, and some Greek Block 52 F-16s are vectoring in. Four Raptors are on an intercept course for the tanker, so you should have plenty of company to keep the Indians off you while you tank. Can you say status yet?"

"Uh, yeah, Zulu, uh . . ." Hayward paused while he reached for a hydraulic transfer switch on the overhead panel, then flipped on the axillary yaw damper . . . "yeah, I think we can hold this crate together for a little while longer."

"Roger two niner, come left to three-five-zero, descend at your discretion of angels one seven, distance to intercept Zebra two three is now four four miles, eight minutes at current rate of descent. They advise broken cloud, moderate chop at that altitude. Also, they'll have a full load for you, and two F-15s to send with you."

"Roger, Zulu, thanks for the good news." Hayward stretched his neck and twisted his head from side to side, and as he did he suddenly wondered what had happened to Angela's flight to D.C. Had London been hit, had her flight taken off yet? There were so many imponderables when he thought of all the death that had taken place so far in this night. Why had he thought of her right now? He hadn't thought about her for hours, but suddenly he felt bereft without her, not knowing where she was, or how she was . . . 

____________________________________

Stuart's flight was almost knocked out of the sky from the initial shock wave of the detonation in the Thames, but the warhead was fairly small, only 5 kilotons, and though the blast had devastated central London, the shock wave had dissipated rapidly as most of the force was absorbed by the Thames. The aircraft had been hit by the equivalent of a huge tailwind and had almost lost the lift necessary to keep the plane aloft, but the pilots had pulled the jet through by applying full power and pushing the nose down hard. Residents in Tooting Broadway must have reeled at the sound of the bomb followed by the 747 clipping television antennae as it roared literally just over their rooftops. It turned out that almost all modern commercial jets were being hardened against electro-magnetic pulse, so their electronic flight control systems didn't fail. Older airliners in the pattern over London didn't fare as well, however, and dozens literally fell out of the sky just moments after the blast. 

Airline dispatchers were able to get word to all flights en-route to and from the United States that they would have to divert to other airfields in the midlands or Ireland as there had been a nuclear attack on London. Soon reports filtered in of other detonations in Europe, and minutes later all air traffic world-wide was grounded. Any aircraft remaining airborne would be assume to be military, and absent correct transponder data, would be assumed hostile and destroyed.

Stuart's 747 sustained structural damage to the wing, and after repeated attempts it was found that the flaps simply would not retract; the aircraft had, therefore, to continue on at reduced speed and altitude and hope for the best. After talking it over, the pilots decided to divert to Shannon, Ireland, and informed British Airways dispatch first, then the passengers. Stuart, like many of the passengers, was slowing beginning to piece together what was happening in the world outside of their little airborne cocoon, and shook inside when the enormity of the catastrophe became apparent.

Many of the passengers on the flight were American, and most were understandably distraught; some needed to be sedated. Flight attendants passed out liquor and calmed the hysterical few, then prepared the passengers for what would surely be an emergency landing. The pilots, after informing the passengers that they were diverting to Shannon, came on a few minutes later to tell them that the landing gears had malfunctioned and would not come down. They passed on what news they had about attacks on the United States and Europe, and told them to follow instructions when they landed and they might all still come through this alive.

Stuart processed that little bit of information, but found she was suddenly very worried that Deke Hayward was somewhere up there in these opening hours of World War III, and she felt sick to her stomach again. She hoped their baby wouldn't be hurt; this was sure to be a rough landing. There were probably a lot of rough landings tonight, she said to herself as she thought again about Hayward and his B-2 hurtling through the night sky over what was surely about to be turned into the raging fires of Hell.

_____________________________________

Cleofus Muldoon rubbed his eyes as he climbed out of the rubble of the collapsed subway tunnel and crawled over huge slabs of collapsed buildings up to street level. Or what should have been street level. Midtown Manhattan looked like a vast tableau of the rubble the world had seen after the World Trade Center attacks. Hundreds of buildings were down, and fire raged in every direction. Muldoon couldn't see any people walking about - no emergency services vehicles could be seen or heard, though he could hear a helicopter hovering nearby. Hot winds swirled around him as he tried to stand on a shifting pile of rubble, and he looked up to see a US Coast Guard helicopter moving slowly over the collapsed buildings on the west side of Central Park. The helicopter trailed a probe of some kind over the debris, then roared off toward Connecticut.

Muldoon looked all around. There was a small market across the street from him; the windows were blown out and he couldn't see a soul anywhere. He walked across this fractured landscape, his footsteps crunching on broken glass as he felt his way across in the twilight until he came to the remnants of the store's doorway.

"Hello?!" he called out. "Anybody home?"

Silence.

Muldoon walked in and bagged some groceries and candles and first aid supplies, then looked around until he found a pencil and paper. He wrote out an IOU and placed it on the cash register and walked back through the rubble to his subway tunnel, and crawled back down into the dark. He crawled toward the cries his daughter made in the dark.

________________________________________

Hayward's B-2 approached the KC-10 once again, and the boom operator called out the distances and pressurized the drogue on contact once again. He watched the tactical display evolve around him; Russian jets closed on the AWACs and were jumped by American Raptors and Israeli Eagles. The Marine jamming aircraft arrived and the Greek Falcons screamed in and took out the Russian AWACs aircraft. Hayward's B-2 was at it's most vulnerable down here in the clouds, it's location was certainly known to every fighter in the area as it refueled just aft of the huge converted airliner. The sooner they could get this over with, Hayward knew, the better things would get.