The Zeppelin Jihad Read online

  There wasn’t anything about that in my briefing at State. I wanted to know more, but he quickly asked, “What caliber are you shooting?” pointing at the top of my magazine. “It doesn’t look like the .40 I understand many American law enforcer agencies use.”

  “It’s a Glock 29. I shoot 10mm.”

  He looked skeptical. “I read that the FBI stopped using 10mm back in the ’80s. Apparently it was too powerful a load, and certain agents—by which I mean female affirmative action hires—couldn’t control it.”

  “Yeah, it is a hot load. I control it just fine.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just firing a downloaded version of the round?”

  When the 10mm turned out to have too much perceived recoil for a lot of people to use, they started to come out with a “lite” version—a nice way of saying “less powder” in the casing.

  “These are full-power loads,” I said.

  “Would you even know the difference?”

  “I should. I had to beg for special permission to carry the round, and part of the deal was I had to pay for my own ammo.”

  His eyebrows rose ever so slightly. I took that to mean he was impressed. His approval shouldn’t have felt as good as it did, but there it was: I was proud.

  Our carrier stopped and we dismounted with the other SIO officers. It was fully dark now. I couldn’t see our trailing pocket zeppelins anymore. The Triclops remained behind while Speer, myself, and fifteen other men fanned into the woods.

  We moved parallel to the road. Silently crossing a mile of broken ground, we finally came to a tall, wooden stockade.

  Speer quietly ordered his men to dig beneath it with their pack-shovels, and once they had, we slipped under it.

  The industrial airship yard was larger than even the airport, with only a few electric lights dotting its expanse. Still, I could make out hangars like low mountains in the distance. Far from us, there were a few airships anchored in the open.

  Nearby was a squat, brick office building. It looked kind of like an aboveground bunker, which made sense given the tons of flammable hydrogen lying around. The lights were on, and I could see movement in the windows. According to Khaliq, Mohammad Talib was hiding there.

  Stacks of shipping containers and I-beams lay here and there about the yard, but nowhere near the building. It was the only structure in the immediate area. Nothing else to offer cover for a hundred yards around it.

  Speer gestured to his men. Two squads moved across the grass towards the building, silent as ghosts while Speer and I hung back with the third squad.

  Then an explosion shattered the quiet.

  It took me a second to process what my eyes had just seen: one moment, a squad leader was halfway across the field. The next, there was a fiery plume of dirt, hurling the man into the air and blowing off his leg below the knee.

  “Minefield!” one of them yelled. “Fall back, fall back!”

  Blinding floodlights hummed to cruel life atop the building. The field was suddenly brighter than Miami at noon.

  Speer’s head swung around, looking at the stockade that would block any escape, and yelled to his squads: “No, it’s a trap! Switch to mercury rounds, shoot out a path through the minefield, and keep moving forward!”

  The advance squads stiffened at Speer’s command, pulled the standard-round clips from their rifles and loaded red-tipped cartridges.

  “Smoke grenades!” he yelled. “Conceal our advance!”

  Men pulled white canisters from their bandoliers and tossed them in an arc towards the building. They hissed as they hit the ground, spewing out thick white smoke.

  Speer ordered someone to launch a flare. It rocketed into the air before bursting.

  The smoke was starting to rise, obscuring the building. Speer and I, along with the squad we’d attached to, began moving towards the stranded men. Everyone that could began shooting into the windows to discourage anyone from firing on us. Mixed volleys of regular and explosive bullets punched into the building, the sharp ping of empty clips being ejected from SIO rifles punctuating the gunfight.

  The suppressing fire didn’t work, though. From one of the smoldering, bullet-shattered windows there was a terrifying BOOM, and a plume of smoke. I perceived more than saw something cut across three men before they fell to the ground, their upper bodies detached from the bloody stump of their lower halves.

  “A cannon?” I dumbly asked no one.

  Over the ringing in my ears, I heard Speer shout to his men that it was chain-shot. My mind grasped for the only time I’d ever heard of chain-shot—a guy I was dating droning on about some Aubrey/Maturin novel he was reading.

  For a second the smoke cleared. It was then I saw another large object being rolled into position at one of the windows: a Gatling gun.

  The 19th century’s version of a machine gun, it had six rotating barrels and fired each one in turn as fast as you could turn its crank. I hadn’t seen anything like it except in westerns.

  “Speer!” I shouted. “They’ve got some kind of Gatling in there!” I spoke quickly, trying to warn him. I didn’t have time to mention that its barrels looked larger than the .50 BMG I’d been allowed to shoot at Quantico.

  The Gatling opened up, shooting blindly into the concealing smoke. But it was brutally effective, punching through men where they stood. Even a grazing shot ripped an arm from one man.

  There was something else about these bullets—after a certain distance they exploded, sending shrapnel in all directions, cutting more men down as they dove for cover.

  “They’re too strong!” I screamed to Speer.

  As if in answer, I heard the cannon BOOM again, and more screaming from the wounded nearby.

  From above, rockets rained down. It took me a second to realize they were coming from our pocket zeppelins. These weren’t anything so sophisticated as heat-seekers or wire-guided missiles, probably just point-aim-shoot, but they did the job, blowing apart the room from where the cannon had been firing.

  “We’ve got to get these men out of here,” Speer said, standing up. His revolver was in hand, the golden cylinder in it. The cannon and Gatling fire had shot through the stockade behind us, taking chunks of the thick wood with it.

  Speer fired two mercury-tipped rounds into the most-damaged section of the fence, blowing open a hole large enough for two men to run through at a time. “Collect the wounded and retreat through the breach!”

  A breeze cleared the smoke for a moment, and I again saw the building relatively clearly. The zeppelins fired another volley, but the rockets were off-target, exploding in front of the building. The Gatling had been withdrawn from the window, and I almost convinced myself that the bad guys had run off.

  Then I saw the Gatling’s bullets ripping out of the building’s upper wall and roof, firing at our zeppelins. I could see sparks in the sky as the shrapnel rounds exploded.

  One of the small zeppelins came crashing down. It had taken a direct hit, its pilots already a red smear before it hit the ground. Another drifted down more slowly, some of the shrapnel having apparently burst its helium bags. The two pilots in the open gondola were frantically trying to maneuver it beyond the stockade when the Gatling reappeared in the window. I watched it draw a bead on the crippled mini-airship. The smoke reasserted itself, covering the scene, so I only heard the rip of the Gatling firing.

  Speer grabbed my arm and dragged me to my feet. “Get out of here!”

  I nodded, wanting badly to get out of that hell, and glad that no one would think less of me for doing so. Then I saw Speer turn back towards the building.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Some of the men from the advance squads may still be alive!” he said, and dashed into the smoke.

  Through the stench of cordite, burnt earth, and blood, I followed.

  I was just a few steps behind him, firing my Glock blindly towards the building, more to give me courage than in the hop
e of actually hitting anything. Speer was firing mercury bullets into the ground. Two exploded harmlessly. Two more managed to set off mines, knocking us back before we pressed forward again.

  We reached where the advance teams had first been cut down. The man who’d lost an arm was lying inert on the ground. We turned him over to check if he was still alive. Covered in blood and dirt, at first I didn’t recognize him—it was Abernathy.

  “Hello, Charlie, how are you doing here?” Speer asked, forcing a smile.

  “Better now that you brought me a nurse,” Abernathy said, weakly gesturing towards me. “I would have preferred her in a white dress and longer hair, but beggars can’t be choosers, right?” He wore a brave face, despite the tear stains on it.

  Speer holstered his revolver, pulled out a pocketknife, and cut the sleeve from his own suit. “Make a tourniquet,” he told me.

  I did as he said.

  “There’s someone else out there,” Speer yelled. I could hear it too, the delirious moaning of a wounded man calling for someone named Rebecca. “You help Abernathy through the stockade—I’m going after that other man.”

  I looked towards the building. “There’s no time—the smoke’s clearing!” I shouted.

  He paused. “Do you feel that rumbling?” he asked, so calmly I thought he had lost his mind.

  “What?” I asked.

  “We’re going to be fine.” Then he disappeared into the smoke.

  I couldn’t feel any rumbling outside my own jackhammering heart. That and the Gatling gun drawing a bead on us were the only things my senses could process.

  So I barely perceived it when the Triclops came crashing through the main gate, two hundred yards from our position.

  The Gatling’s operator saw it before I did, swinging his barrels around and opening fire. The heavy rounds pinged off the tank’s armor as it advanced, leveling one of its three cannons.

  The left-most cannon fired, and an artillery shell smashed a hole into the structure the size of a bowling ball.

  I would have expected the entire building to explode, taking us with it. Instead, there was a seconds-long pause before all the windows and doors blew out, sending papers, bodies, and even the Gatling gun flying from the building. The building’s floodlights cut off. A rush of hurricane-strength air blasted over us, clearing what remained of the smoke.

  Now I could see Speer again, just fifteen yards from me. He had taken off the remains of his suit coat and was using it to compress a man’s chest wound. “See? I told you we were going to be fine,” he called wearily. “Wish I could say the same for everyone.”

  The Triclops drove towards us, guns trained on the building, with the two personnel carriers chugging behind. From the carriers, medics rushed out to take over care of the wounded. They took over from Speer on the man with the chest wound.

  One of the Triclops’ hatches popped open, and Sgt. Baylor and several of his men climbed out. He joined us near the ruined office building.

  “Thanks for not going with nitro shells there, Lawrence,” Speer said.

  “I figured we might have men close-in, so a hyper-compressed air shell was the safest wager,” Baylor said. “Of course, the downside is that some of these animals might still be alive. Shall we?” He pulled his long-barreled service revolver from its holster.

  Speer removed the empty golden cylinder and replaced it with the black one. “Yes, let’s. Care to join us, Special Agent Hoff? Let’s see if your man is living or dead.”

  I loaded a fresh magazine. “Sounds lovely.”

  Before we could enter, the last of the pocket zeppelins descended slowly towards some nearby tarmac. Speer called up to the pilot, “MacBride, get skyward again immediately!”

  But the zeppelin kept drifting down.

  We ran to it where it landed and saw that both pilots were injured. It had to be shrapnel from when the Gatling was hosing down the sky with lead. One had a head wound and wasn’t even conscious. The pilot sitting in the lead position was alert despite the chest wound making a dark, spreading stain on his uniform. “Sorry, sir. I think we’re both in a bad way.”

  As Speer yelled for medics, Baylor’s voice was low to me. “I hope you report to your superiors the amount of good men’s blood we spent for them.”

  “I will,” I said.

  3

  Fight the Sky

  We didn’t find Talib in the shattered building. But among the debris we found Korans, communiqués from Middle Eastern charity fronts, a smuggled-in satellite phone, and weapons.

  We also found air route maps.

  “Look at these,” Baylor said, picking up one of the maps from the wreckage. “They must have been planning to hijack some of the industrial airships.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “I mean, this is an airship yard. Couldn’t these just be maps from the building?”

  “Oh, they have lots of maps in here, miss, same as you’d find in any yard office,” Baylor said. “Except Pointers don’t generally plot routes with hydrogen-filled airships over residential areas. Much less with their final destination being the nation’s tallest buildings.”

  They had been planning on destroying the Faced Towers. “Looks like we just avoided your 9/11,” I said.

  “Hopefully that will be some solace to our casualties’ next-of-kin,” Speer said as he entered the room.

  “I don’t suppose you had any luck?” I asked.

  “No,” Speer said. “Talib’s definitely not among the dead. Even the ones killed in the rocket attack weren’t burnt beyond recognition. None of them were even Arab.”

  “Any word from the patrols?” I asked. Speer had had more SIO men brought up to set up a cordon and search the area. “I still think he might have slipped out during the firefight. If that’s the case, he can’t have gotten far.”

  “No sightings reported as of yet,” Speer said.

  “Perhaps the survivors will have some information on where he’s gotten to,” Baylor offered.

  The few that we’d captured alive had been dazed. Blood was coming out of their ears, the hyper-compressed air having burst their eardrums. “Going to be hard to question men that can’t hear,” I said.

  Baylor shrugged. “I have a feeling Deke Harker will find a way to make them talk.”

  I looked over at Speer with his shirtsleeves rolled up, tie undone, and his vest smeared with blood. Dirty-faced, hair a mess, he looked stylishly disheveled, like a hero at the end of an action movie.

  That is, except for the frown on his face as he stared at one of the terrorists’ corpses.

  “Something wrong, Speer?” I asked, which I realized was a stupid question. With as many men as we’d just lost, what in the world could count as right?

  “It’s just . . . did you notice none of them were Arab?”

  I nodded. “Yes, you mentioned that.”

  “That means they’re all Pointers. Native born.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand how they could join with something like this.”

  A Koran that had survived the brief battle sat politely on a fire-singed work desk. He picked it up, considered it for a moment, then tossed it on the ground. “I’m going out for some fresh air.”

  I sorted through more captured papers for a while before heading outside to take a break myself. I found Speer stretched out in the pilot seat of the still-functioning pocket zeppelin. He was smoking a cigarillo, looking up at the stars.

  “Nice night,” I said.

  “I suppose.”

  “I would have expected it to be much colder.”

  “There are many unusual aspects of Pointe Island’s geography. Our mild climate, notwithstanding the island’s latitude, is just one of them.”

  “You people are lucky to have such a special homeland.”

  “I used to think so,” he said. “If that’s the case, though, why did those men ally with a filthy foreigner? Supercriminals I can understand. The desire for mon
ey and power make sense. But to betray your nation? Your people? It’s beyond disturbing.”

  “I can see why it would be,” I said.

  “Yes. A bitter lesson. Ideology trumps race,” he said.

  I sighed. “I take it the patrols haven’t sighted Talib?”

  “No, although I believe we’re still awaiting one’s return.” He tossed away the cigarillo and took a pocket watch from his vest. “In fact, they should have returned by now. Let’s check on them.”

  We walked towards the three massive airships that weren’t hangared. “They were probably going to use these for their attack,” I said.

  “No doubt. Perhaps that last patrol is still searching one of them. These industrial airships are so much larger than their civilian cousins.”

  I’d never given much thought to airships until coming here. The closest I’d come to seeing one in person was the Goodyear Blimp at a football game. My briefing packet had actually included diagrams of them; the part where passengers rode was called the gondola. The rigid outer structure contained the unceremoniously named gas-bag that made them float. Propellers were usually located aft of the gondola; rudders and elevator flaps on the butt-end made them look like fat torpedoes.

  There was a stack of cargo containers obstructing our view of the airships’ gondolas. We walked around them, and as we turned the corner into the shadows we came across the missing patrol.

  The two uniformed men were lying in a pool of blood. Their throats had been slit, and their rifles taken.

  “Bloody hell,” Speer whispered.

  Just then, I saw one of the airships move. It was the one furthest from us, and I couldn’t believe how rapidly—and silently—it drifted up. Especially given that beneath their gondolas, these industrial airships each had a huge cargo-carrying palette. The one taking flight was carrying a payload of I-beams. I could see its name on the top rudder: Highwhale.