Phoenix Sub Zero

His anger and grief would coalesce into a hunger for revenge … his understanding that his own personal loss was shared by thousands his troops had left fatherless never really occurred to him … In the broken service tunnel of the headquarters bunker, Ahmed’s uniform was soaked in cold sweat. His heart was pounding, his breath wheezed. The vision of the smoking ruins of Chah Bahar vanished in a swirling storm of dots, yellow and red and blue dots.

He shook his head, slowly realizing he had been unconscious, unable to escape the Chah Bahar nightmare even when knocked out by an enemy attack on the bunker. He heard rushing noises, dripping noises … the noise of air as it rushed in and blew out. The sounds grew in volume.

Choking, rasping, retching noises filled the dark space. He tried to move, going nowhere at first, feeling pressure from something lying on top of him. A slick feel against a harder surface. A liquid. Blood or water.

He tried again to move, trying his arm first, surprised when it followed his command. His other arm, then his legs.

He tried to get up but was pinned. He tried to roll, and felt a jagged piece of steel jab into his ribs. He rolled the other way and felt pressure ease up, allowing him to breathe.

There was still no light, but another sound, a spurting, sprinkling noise.

The attack on the bunker had come, as Ahmed had predicted.

The tunnel, their intended escape route, had partially collapsed, its concrete upper half smashed to dust by the fist of the explosions. What had been the floor of the tunnel was littered with smashed pieces of concrete, sand, dirt, wires and cables. No sign of Sihoud.

It hit him then … Sihoud was dead, and with him the hopes of the thirty nations and half billion people of the Union. The United Islamic Front, in minutes, had been doomed. The attack had, as Ahmed feared, been a decapitation.

Because without Mohammed al-Sihoud, everything was lost. Ahmed heard his own voice call out for the Khalib.

Soon his voice was drowned by another sound. What before had been a spritzing sound, a dim noise of rain, now became a sound of rushing force. The water pipe, which had once fed the bunker, had ruptured and was flooding the remains of the utility tunnel. The water had submerged his face, and he twisted into a violent roll. The same piece of steel jabbed into his ribs, and he decided he would rather be stabbed to death by the reinforcing steel in the chunk of concrete that held him down than be drowned by the water line.

The steel cut into him, ripping open the skin at his ribs, cutting into muscle and scraping bone, coming close to puncturing the lung beneath the bone, until his chest was no longer in contact with the metal, only the smooth underside of the concrete chunk. By then the water had risen over Ahmed’s prone body. He continued to twist and felt his back scrape across the concrete block. In a corner of his mind, prepared for death, he realized that he was free. He pumped his legs and pushed with his hands and was able to half-stand.

His head splashed out of the water into the damp darkness of the half-collapsed tunnel, water up to his waist. He had to find Sihoud. He had to shut off the flooding water. He had to get them out of the tunnel. He had to get Sihoud to a place of safety. As he searched in the rising water for Sihoud, he realized it would be no good merely to get the Khalib to another command post, to a field battlefield company.

What had happened would happen again and again until the enemy had achieved their goal of killing Sihoud and decapitating the Union. He had to find the one place on earth where the coalition’s commandos and assassins would be unable to reach him. The water, the rising water in the tunnel, had keyed a dim memory in Ahmed’s mind, but as yet he was uncertain what the connection was. And then it suddenly seemed obvious. Sihoud had to go into exile, much as the Prophet Himself had gone into exile to Medina almost fourteen centuries before. The Prophet’s exile had been called the hegira, and so would Sihoud’s. And like the Prophet Mohammed, Sihoud would return in glory, not with horses and swords but with high-altitude radar-invisible supersonic cruise missiles loaded with radioactive plutonium.

Five steps down the tunnel Ahmed tripped on something.

He reached down into the water, grabbed hold, and pulled with all his strength. Sihoud had been trapped under a piece of metal, but he must have been unconscious because the metal rolled off easily. His head came out of the water. He was not breathing. Ahmed leaned Sihoud’s face back and clamped his lips on the lips of the Khalib and blew.