124

 

 

Weiss, carrying a laptop, sauntered into the control room, still whistling. He was followed by the majordomo, bearing a glass of Coke. Sheikh Ali turned slowly, looked at him. Weiss stopped whistling. He took the Coke, nodded his thanks.

The Sheikh turned to The Man, laid his hand on his muscled forearm. The Man looked vaguely queasy, thought the Sheikh. He was not a natural sailor, and the conditions were testing many of those aboard. It seemed to him that only he, the captain, and Hassan were truly immune.

“I would like you to escort Dr. Boudain into the helicopter. Ride with her a while. She loves the sea. Let it make a fitting grave for her. Burial at sea, like Sheikh Osama,” he added with a smile. “I see an open door, a gunshot to the head, a little push. Pfff! Game over.”

The Man nodded. “Why did she come here?”

“To warn me about Gabriel Messenger. She thinks he wants to start an ARk Storm.”

“Messenger?” The Man angled his head in disbelief. “She thinks it’s him?”

“She appears to. She appears to have no idea what she’s walked into.”

“So she didn’t kill our men?”

“I have to believe that Jacobsen did that.”

The Man shook his head in disbelief at their luck.

“It wasn’t luck!” observed the Sheikh, reading his mind as he so often did. “It was God’s will.”

Because he had to, The Man nodded. Only a billionaire zealot would spit in the face of luck.

“Maintain the pretense that you are flying her out of harm’s way. That way you can take her by surprise when the time comes.”

“I’ll do my best.” The Man walked from the room, feeling the thrill of incipient action for the second time that day.

He checked his weapon, hidden in the holster inside his loose chinos, concealed under the long leather jacket. He had two spare magazines concealed too. More than enough firepower to do the job. He didn’t like killing but sometimes there was no other way. And if he were to live, it was the only way. A life for a life. A fair trade.

The Sheikh turned to his protégé.

“Hassan. Our time has come. Is all ready?”

Hassan, Weiss, glowed in the look the Sheikh bestowed, in the complicity, in the momentousness of their creation. He registered the death sentence he had just heard issued on Gwen Boudain, but felt almost unmoved by it. In war, there were casualties. Jihad demanded them, welcomed them.

“Everything is perfectly ready,” he replied, eyes fixed on the Sheikh.

“Then get all the drones in the air. Every last one. Make sure the program is set to maximum yield.” The Sheikh smiled. “Let us give California the flood of our Holy Quran. Let us give them the ARk Storm of their nightmares.”

Hassan smiled. All it took was one click of a button. He set the laptop on the desk, sat before it. He had already wiped the blood off it, but a small smear remained. He ignored it now. He turned to the neighboring desktop, clicked in a command. A four-way split scene shimmered into life: one image showed a tarmac strip on which two runways were marked in yellow paint, another a huge hangar, the third and fourth just showed rain-sluiced sky.

Hassan turned back to his laptop. He glanced up at the Sheikh. “Ready?”

The Sheikh angled his body forward. “Go!”

Hassan’s finger hovered over the command. Then he hit ENTER.

His program sent its instructions to the drones, which waited for his command, massed like a private army. Hassan pointed to the desktop. The quarter-screen image showed the massive door of the hangar, designed to look like a grain silo, slowly retracting back into its groove. Then when fully open, the next image showed drone after drone after drone come to life, engines whirring. Obeying the commands sent to the GPS each one carried, they moved slowly from the hangar, accelerated along the landing strip, then rose into the air.

A few didn’t make it. Hit by gusts of wind as they prepared to take off, they were hurled to the side and tipped over, but the resources of the Sheikh allowed for redundancy. Forty percent of the drones could crash and still the model would work, still the rain yield would be ramped up, maybe by as much as twenty-five percent.

Fifty drones could cover a massive area, perhaps ten thousand square miles. Up and off they went, aiming for their preordained orbits where in groupings of five they would fly round and round, gaining and losing altitude as programed. Ramping the storm.

The Sheikh watched the live feed, saw the drones nosing into the turbulent air. His own private army. His jihad.

“Live by the drone, die by the drone,” he murmured.