The first of the Iranian tanks disappeared into a giant void hundreds of yards across that opened up as if the very earth had disappeared. Thirty-five tanks and their crews vanished in a split second. The devastation did not stop there. The fault opened even farther, faster than any of the men or their machines could respond to. In less than a minute, 90 percent of the Iranian divisions had disappeared. It was as if they had never existed.
On the Iraqi side of the border, the ground split and rushed toward the newly installed corps commander's HQ. The entire reinforced camp exploded upward and outward as if it had been sprayed off the desert floor by a giant fire hose. The land situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers rose to a height of 170 feet before it started its plunge back to the rivers. Then the rivers rippled violently, emptying their waters into the sky and surrounding desert. Entire villages and towns collapsed and were shaken into the desert sands. The fault ripped north into Baghdad and south into the Persian Gulf. The quake was causing the newly repaired capital city of Baghdad to moan as if it were a tired animal caught by the throat and shaken by a powerful beast. Towering buildings fell into their smaller neighbors, immediately killing hundreds of thousands.
Out at sea, three commercial oil tankers being escorted by two British destroyers through the Strait of Hormuz were suddenly pushed a mile from the shores of the United Arab Emirates as the gulf waters retreated from a conjoining undersea quake. Then the giant swell of water rushed back toward the land that it had only moments before vacated. The sea rose one hundred feet before the watery tumult crushed the two warships and capsized the three supertankers. The tsunami continued into Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, destroying the coastal cities and dragging back into the gulf more than 130,000 souls.
Finally, the earth became still.
Above, the supposed off-course commercial jetliner turned away after overflying a fifty-mile-long line of recent oil-well excavations that had gone unnoticed in the previous weeks just inside the Iraqi border.
The second strike of Thor's Hammer was complete, and the chess game had begun in earnest.
2
On the quiet river, a fishing boat bobbed gently at anchor. A red and blue striped awning was spread out over the length of the boat and its occupants were unseen. Several fishing poles were lazily bending over the gentle current.
The quiet of the late afternoon was harshly broken by the sound of a boat motor as it approached the anchored fishing vessel in the center of the laziest part of the river. This second boat was painted dull green and there were several men standing at its gunwales. As they approached the center of the Nile, they scrutinized the anchored boat with suspicious eyes. They saw a small American flag near the stern, next to the powerful outboard motor. The stars and stripes caught the gentle evening breeze and then relaxed as the brief respite against the heat dwindled to nothing.
The men watched as a lone head popped up from the interior of the boat and looked their way. One hand plopped over the side and struck the water and then the man gently rubbed water on his face. The men in the approaching boat sneered and the tall black man at the stern said only one word: 'Americans.'
They watched as the dark-haired man slid slowly into the boat as they moved on toward their destination. All twelve men were armed with lethal-looking machetes and four of them had Russian-made AK-47 assault rifles. The African leader kept his eyes on the American boat but relaxed when the American didn't reappear. Then he looked at the American camp across the way and saw that they were being watched from there also. He thought that after he was finished he just might as well see what the American archaeo-logical dig had in the way of ransom. He smiled and hefted his automatic rifle and its weight felt good to him, offering up that surge of power he always received when he was about to take human life.
'Who in the hell is running an aircraft engine on the river?'
Lieutenant Jason Ryan moved his head again and felt the explosion of pain as he attempted to open his eyes.
'Boat,' he managed to say through a mouth that felt as if a herd of wildebeests had crapped in it.
'What?' another man asked from his prone position.
'It looked like a boat full of Bloods or Crips, or both. Some kind of nasty-looking gang anyway,' answered Ryan.
At the stern, Colonel Jack Collins attempted to raise his aching head and look around. He saw the stern of the offending boat as it was now about fifty yards past their anchored position.
'I don't think Ethiopia has a gang problem, at least not yet,' he said as he lay back down. 'All I want is for that noise to stop.'
Another irritating sound entered the air as another boat shoved off from shore and headed their way.
'What in the hell is all that noise? Is the Ethiopian navy conducting drills out here or what?' asked a large blond man in the front of the boat. He sat up and immediately regretted it. He pushed his way out from under ten beer cans and looked around.
Jack Collins looked from Jason Ryan to Captain Carl Everett and then nudged the black man passed out at his feet with dirty bilge water lapping at his face.
'Hey, Lieutenant, this was your party, so get up and get to the bottom of this, will you?'
'This was not my idea, Colonel. I was bushwhacked,' the newly commissioned officer said, not even attempting to rise from the filthy bottom of the boat. 'I don't feel so good,' Will Mendenhall said as a follow- up.
'That new second lieutenant drunk and disorderly already, Jack?' Everett asked as he leaned over the side and splashed water onto his face and over his short hair.
'I think it was the combination of sun, rotgut whiskey, beer, and those old CDs the colonel brought,' Ryan said as he leaned over the side of the boat, wondering if he was going to keep his dinner down or feed it to the fishes.
Collins squinted into the setting sun and shaded his eyes to spy the boat from camp as it moved toward them at a good clip. 'Leave my music out of it, Lieutenant; you junior officers just can't handle your liquor,' he said as he gently shook his head, trying to clear it of the effects of the alcohol they had consumed early that morning.
A man and a woman slowed and brought their rubber Zodiac next to the larger boat. The woman, who knew Colonel Collins only from hearsay, was shocked to see the state of the man and his security team. Vacation or not, this was not what she expected from the man who had become a legend in his two short years at the Event Group.
'Colonel, did you see those men just pass you?'
Collins looked into the young face of Lance Corporal Sanchez, who had taken over for Mendenhall so that he could join them to celebrate the former staff sergeant's commissioning as a new officer in the U.S. Army.
'Ryan did; he said they looked kind of salty.'
'Well, we just received orders to take the dig team out of here. Seems something is going on farther north of here. Major earthquakes, the Group said. There's something else: the Ethiopian government issued a warning about groups of raiders plying the river. Those salty-looking guys just may be some of them,' Doctor of Archaeology Sandra Leekie said as she tied the Zodiac to the larger boat. 'And it's a shame, too, Colonel; we're starting to find some very strange stuff in these sands, things that really have no right to be here.'
'Well, officially, Mr. Everett, Lieutenant Ryan and I aren't even supposed to be in this country. Will here'--he nudged Mendenhall with his shoe again--'is officially the security leader on this dig.'
'The director radioed and warned us that there have been several raids on Ethiopian and Sudanese national and private dig sites all along the Blue Nile. He ordered us out,' Leekie said as she spied the liquor bottles and beer cans strewn about the boat.
Collins looked downriver, where the first boat had disappeared. 'Do you know who's down that way?' he asked.
'As far as we know, there's a minor dig site managed by some students and professors from Addis Abba, about a thousand yards upriver.'
