Countdown to Armageddon Read online

  Countdown to Armageddon

  EDWARD M. LERNER

  PROLOGUE

  O true believers, take your necessary precautions against your enemies. . . .

  —The Koran

  Lebanon, 1983 (amid civil war)

  The village baked under the late-morning sun.

  A few small homes, some generations old, clustered around the dusty bazaar. Each dwelling had been painstakingly assembled by hand, stone upon stone. Here and there could be seen a scrawny goat, grazing to the limits of its tether.

  Two dhows bobbed on the gentle blue Mediterranean. The young men of the village laughed as they worked, for the breeze was cool and their nets heavy. Ashore, their fathers and grandfathers studied the Koran in the small mosque while veiled women worked in their kitchens or tended to their sewing, smiling at the sounds of children at play.

  A young Arab dressed in Levi’s, a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and Nikes took a place at the nets, ignoring the gentle jibes at his soft hands and city clothes. There was pride in his friends’ teasing voices and unarticulated delight that someone from their little village had gone to college. In the village he was famous; the villagers imagined in their simple goodness that such talent as his must also be renowned in the great outer world.

  The visiting youth had not forgotten his roots, or the hard, physical labor of the boats. The lapping of the waves, the rhythm of the work, the honest tiredness and dreamless sleep at the end of the day—they would always be a part of him. Occasionally, as he hauled in the nets, the breeze would bring snatches of a child’s happy voice. He liked to imagine it was Leila’s voice. Of everyone and everything in the dear, sweet village, he most missed his baby sister.

  An eerie, high-pitched whistle, scarcely audible above the crashing surf, gave the only warning of impending doom. The first shells blasted harmless geysers from the unresisting beach, but hidden artillerymen quickly corrected their aim. The fishermen watched in horror as the next three salvos walked up the shore into the defenseless village. The fifth salvo bracketed the mosque, toppling the slender minaret. The terrified screams of women and children filled the gaps between explosions.

  Frantically, the village fishermen turned their boats for the beach. Abandoned nets sinking behind them, they cursed as the wind failed them. They cursed again when trucks and armored personnel carriers roared out of the hills toward the village. It was the hated Phalange.

  Salvo after salvo pounded the village until the motorized column approached within a hundred meters. Most houses had crumbled by then. Shell-shocked survivors emerged to dig through the rubble with their bare hands.

  Using erratic puffs of wind, their desperation, and the skills passed on over generations, the fishermen urged their boats homeward. They stared in disbelief as an antitank rocket collapsed the mosque that had heard the prayers of their grandfathers’ grandfathers. They howled at the trucks careening madly through the rubble-strewn streets, as sadistic Christian butchers machine-gunned fleeing women and children at point-blank range.

  As their dhows neared the shore, the fishermen came under attack. Machine-gun fire shredded hulls and flesh alike. A few made it whole and alive into the sea, only to be blasted from the water by hand grenades. Corpses bobbed obscenely amid the flotsam. One by one the young men died, the last sounds they heard in this world the maniacal laughter of the accursed Christians.

  “Leila!”

  Images that would not leave sustained the tormented voice. Great gulps of caustic salt water could not silence his cry, nor hours of agonized screaming, nor even absolute exhaustion. The young, city-dressed Arab lay half across a bit of broken mast, his hands, without any direction from a conscious, reasoning mind, clutching the tangled cordage.

  He drifted.

  The tide dragged him, raving, far out to sea. He was rescued two days later by a passing Cretan freighter. The honest seamen had to pry his fingers from the ropes to which he clung. He wanted to kill these Christian dogs; deranged from dehydration and sunstroke, he could not even stand. His feeble lunge was mistaken for a stumble.

  He awoke in a swaying hammock. A pale, unwelcome clarity, if not quite sanity, had asserted itself as he slept. He would have preferred lunacy had it meant that he could forget.

  His parents, slaughtered. Grandfather, crushed in his own beloved mosque. His childhood friends shot like so many clay pigeons.

  And little Leila . . .

  He had watched helplessly as so many children died. Indistinct with distance, every face became Leila’s face. Every death, Leila’s death—over and over and over.

  The sole survivor of a nameless Lebanese town knew one thing to the core of his being. Some day, terribly, he would redeem his baby sister’s many deaths in a bottomless ocean of Christian blood.

  PART I

  When great causes are on the move in the world . . . we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

  —Winston S. Churchill

  NEW YORK CITY, 2009

  “That’s not how time travel really works.”

  Harry Bowen regretted the words almost before they left his mouth.

  It wasn’t the margaritas talking, although he did have a pleasant buzz, or even the congenial company. He couldn’t put his finger on it until long after. It was a nostalgia trip, pure and simple, that lowered his guard and brought the long-repressed story to his lips.

  The night had become too much like college. Not the classes, certainly not, but the late-night bull sessions. Three, four, maybe five guys in the dorm lounge up way past the witching hour, feet on the furniture, snarfing pizza and chugging smuggled beer, just talking and talking. What was the meaning of life? What existed before the universe, or before God, take your pick? Was “before the universe” a meaningful concept, anyway, you drooling cretin?

  The conference’s welcoming cocktail hour had been standard down to the regulation two complimentary drink tickets that had come paper-clipped to his name tag, the overcooked miniature hot dogs on plastic cavalry-saber toothpicks, the soggy Triscuits, and the zillion desiccated cheese cubes. The corporate scientists who had traveled together stuck together, earnestly debating their restaurant choices over their free drinks before drifting out to expense-account dinners. Academics who had refereed each other’s papers for years and attended the same conferences since before the Flood warmly greeted each other. They, too, soon vanished. That left the grad students, some federal researchers on per diem, and a few lonely, unaccompanied, small-company types like him. Even though Harry was presenting a paper at the conference, Solid State Science, Inc. considered its payment of his airfare an act of almost mythic generosity. Meal allowance? Wouldn’t he have eaten at home?

  This was Harry’s first time at the Particle Accelerator Symposium. He didn’t know a soul here. He looked around the big ballroom, by then almost empty, and sighed. Lunch at a Manhattan deli near where the new World Trade Center towers were rising had just about drained the day’s meager meal budget. Maybe he should just retreat to his room.

  Still, his stomach was grumbling. Food to soak up the margaritas, no matter how institutional, would be wise. The half box of chocolate-covered somethings in his briefcase wouldn’t cut it. In his hotel room he’d only mope around, anyway, missing Julia. He stayed to graze the free hors d’oeuvres table for a while longer.

  When the evening birds-of-a-feather session started (Harry never did catch the topic, something about relativistic muons), he followed the crowd into the nearby meeting room. The gangling Indian physicist trying t
o run the forum was too shy to ride herd on the tipsy crew. Before long, an SF enthusiast—hardly a rarity at a physics conference—had hijacked the session. Soon they were talking about faster-than-light communications with tachyon beams, reactionless space drives, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It wasn’t really physics, but it was fun.

  The bull session continued until well past midnight, ending only after the rustlings of impatient janitors became intrusive. The most garrulous members of the group, Harry among them, adjourned to a back booth in the hotel’s lounge. He ordered a platter of nachos and a pitcher of margaritas, thinking budget be damned.

  The conversation wandered into time travel and down the Teflon-coated slope into the grandfather paradox. Could you travel back in time and kill your grandfather before your father, let alone you, were even born? If you succeeded, then who was it who performed the mission? If now no one goes back, then what’s to stop grandma and grandpa from having at it? Back and forth they went, pointlessly arguing about cause and effect and alternate universes.

  It was then that Harry’s big mouth struck. “That’s not how time travel really works.” Damn! Why had he spoken? He hadn’t told the entire story to anyone, not even Julia. After all, who would believe it? But these were physicists. If they believed that he believed it, his reputation would be shot.

  The meeting hijacker, a red-haired grad student from MIT, eyed him speculatively. “You know this from personal experience, do you?” The line got a laugh—not much more than a chuckle, really, but enough to trigger Harry’s stubborn streak. He knew what he knew, and he would edit as he went along. Harry pictured the next few minutes in his mind’s eye: He’d tell what would come across, safely, as a cock-and-bull story, his new friends would realize that they’d been had, and someone would buy him a drink. It seemed workable.

  “Experience?” Harry whispered conspiratorially. His companions leaned closer. “In a manner of speaking, yes.” He straightened out of his habitual slouch, propping his elbows on the table and leaning forward confidentially. The flickering flame in the candle-globe centerpiece cast light and shadow across four expectant faces. The lounge’s background murmur chose that instant to fall into a momentary hush. He glanced at the neighboring booths, as though to reassure himself that no one was eavesdropping.

  “It happened five years ago. Spring. My wife and I were on vacation—a second honeymoon of sorts. We were backpacking across France . . . .”

  VOSGES MOUNTAINS, FRANCE, 2004

  Dawn peeked red-eyed over the hills. For all that the calendar said Mai, at this altitude the dew was frozen. Harry inched across the paired sleeping bags, planning to snuggle up to Julia for warmth. No one was home.

  He might as well get up, too. Harry crawled out of the sleeping bags, stood, and stretched. They had camped beside a small stream; he gritted his teeth, then scooped a handful of icy water onto his face. It worked faster than coffee.

  They had stopped for the night in a small clearing high in the foothills of the Vosges. Dense forest stretched all around, as far as the eye could see. Birds chirped and chattered among the trees. A few hundred yards to the east lay the cave where he had damn near broken his ankle on their first trip.

  Only a wispy contrail high in the cloudless sky hinted at civilization. Even in the wild, though, Julia disliked stubble. Harry poked the banked fire back to life, then assembled his gear while water came to a boil in a small pan. There was no reasonable place to set his little shaving mirror. He rested the metal disk against a small rock and sat tailor style in front of it.

  He couldn’t complain about the reflection. Genetics could take credit for the strong jaw, the jet-black hair, and the pale blue eyes—and, for that matter, for the broad-shouldered, six-foot-two frame the mirror did not capture. Julia’s love of camping and hiking had added a deep tan and character lines. Some combination of genetics and the exercise kept him trim and fit. Julia liked to imagine that he’d had to beat the girls off with a stick before she met him—a fantasy of which he had done nothing to disabuse her.

  Harry tied four short lines with baited hooks to low-lying branches that overhung the stream. He assumed his wife was off somewhere with her sketchpad. For Julia, this was a working vacation. The sketches could well pay for the trip: They were good. Still, he wished she’d get back soon. He was ready for breakfast—and things weren’t ever as good without her.

  Her petite figure finally emerged from the woods upstream. She’d gathered her flowing blond hair into a long, high ponytail. She was wearing tight jeans and a red sweater: Practical, yet sexy—that was Julia. Sketchpad under her arm, she moseyed up to him. “Hey, lazybones. What does a working girl have to do around here to get breakfast?”

  He answered with a leer.

  “Again?” Laughing, she plopped down beside him. “What ever will you expect for dinn . . . ?”

  He covered her lips with his own.

  All the frost had melted when they woke for the second time. She cleared her lovely throat. “About breakfast, sir.”

  His fishing lines still hung limply in the rippling current. “Funny thing, sport, these snooty French fish refuse to consort with Americans. We have instant coffee, a couple of eggs, and some bread. Period. You wanna hitch a ride into Metz after breakfast for some real food, or will we live on twigs and berries?”

  Julia opted for town. Their tattered map led them to a deeply rutted dirt road, where an old man with a roving eye stopped for them. Well, for her. Julia charmed the beret off him; he reciprocated by letting them ride in the back of his horse-drawn farm wagon. They bounced along into some small market town, from which their Europasses got them onto the train up the Moselle valley into Metz.

  They splurged on a hotel room with a private bath, then Julia went shopping for new camping supplies. Phase one complete: He was unsupervised in Metz. Julia had insisted on this trip as a mental-health break for him; vacation or not, he meant to visit the nearby Rothschild Institute. The Rothschilds—surprise, surprise—had financed the world’s largest superconducting storage ring.

  Harry exhumed the one fresh change of clothes from his backpack. Clean wrinkles were as close as he could come to respectability. He left Julia a note.

  She had long ago shamed him into studying French, “the language of culture and science.” (“Not in this century,” he’d grumbled, but he’d learned anyway. It beat reading the subtitles when she picked the movie.) Here in the Alsace-Lorraine, his guttural accent wasn’t even terribly unusual. He tried it out on the skeptical guard at the institute’s gatehouse.

  “Dr. Bowen, you say?” The sentry ineffectively covered a yawn. He needed dental work.

  “Oui. Tell Alain, I mean Dr. Garreau, that we met at a colloquium at Drexel Institute.” That had been two years ago, and only a brief conversation—a chat over coffee after the presentation, really—but Harry hoped it would be enough to get him in.

  He never learned if it would have been. The guard had just lifted the telephone handset when an explosion rocked the grounds. The gatehouse leapt a foot into the air, crashed back, then shuddered again when the ground wave hit. A wrought-iron gate burst from its hinges, to hang askew from its still-standing mate by a shared padlock. Harry glimpsed a horrified look on the no-longer-bored guard as they dashed through the broken gates toward the main building.

  Screams and smoke poured from the shattered edifice. The second and third stories on the uphill side had crumbled; somehow, groaning support columns in the basement continued to bear the redistributed load. Harry kicked open a sagging door and ran inside. The guard followed.

  Dazed people in bloody lab coats stumbled through thick smoke. Downstairs, someone howled. Harry climbed over the rubble—chunks of plaster, splintered doors and furniture, smashed laboratory equipment—that covered the stairs and clogged the basement’s main corridor. Coughing from the acrid fumes, he went toward the screams. Klaxo
ns wailed in the distance, hopefully ambulances from the town.

  The cries were getting weaker; he dare not hesitate. A ceiling fixture dangled by its wires, sparking; with each shudder of the settling building the lamp jiggled and danced. He scavenged a mop from a janitor’s closet and, holding the arcing wires at bay, edged past.

  Double doors, nothing remaining but splinters on hinges, ended the hallway. Beyond them, someone whimpered. A lump of falling plaster shattered at his feet as he scuttled inside.

  He found a random jumble of equipment racks, lab benches, storage cabinets, computers, and Dewar flasks. Dented and cracked, the cryogenic flasks spewed a surrealistic fog that coiled and crept about the large laboratory. Whoever had called out lay hidden in the mist.

  He shouted encouragement as he groped through the room, shivering in the frigid, waist-high haze. The whimpering echoed eerily in the misty chamber, providing no guidance to its source. He kept searching as he inched around obstacles hidden in the vapors.

  A sob came from almost underfoot, and he saw her. Rime and plaster dust coated her face and hair; he could not guess her age. A storage cabinet across her legs pinned her to the floor.

  Harry reached under the cabinet and tugged. Nothing. He tried again, more desperately. As something tore in his back, unknown items rocked inside. The cabinet scarcely budged. It had landed doors down—he couldn’t unload it.

  Harry recovered the mop. With a stool on its side for a fulcrum, he levered the cabinet up a few inches. Grunting from the effort, balancing on one foot, he kicked some nondescript refuse under the cabinet. The woman’s face was ashen. He put all his weight on the mop handle; this time, using a smashed oscilloscope, he propped the cabinet up higher. With a final heave, the cabinet crashed aside. Glass inside tinkled.

  He had uncovered a new horror—a crushed Dewar. Liquid helium had frozen her from the waist down; one thigh, ultrabrittle from the cold, had shattered. Blood seeped from the red ice of a jagged stump, flash-cauterized by the extreme cold. As Harry’s guts clenched, the ceiling collapsed across several nearby workbenches.