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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.