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For one thing, the Babylon gun, with its 156-meter barrel, could not stay rigid without supports. It needed one trunnion, or support, for every second of its twenty-six barrel sections, even if, as he foresaw, its barrel ran up the forty-five-degree side of a mountain. Without these supports, the barrel would droop like wet spaghetti and tear itself apart as the joins ripped open.

Therefore, it could not raise or depress its elevation, nor traverse from side to side. So it could not pick a variety of targets. To change its angle, up or down or side to side, it would have to be dismantled, taking weeks. Even to clea

n out and reload between discharges would take a couple of days. Moreover, repeated firings would wear out that very expensive barrel. Lastly, Babylon could not be hidden from counterattack.

Every time it fired, a gobbet of flame ninety meters long would leap from its barrel, and every satellite and airplane would spot it. Its map coordinates would be with the Americans in seconds. Also, its reverberation shock waves would reach any good seismograph as far away as California. That was why he told anyone who would listen, “It cannot be used as a weapon.”

His problem was that after two years in Iraq, he had realized that for Saddam Hussein science had one application and one only: It was to be applied to weapons of war and the power they brought him and to nothing else . So why the hell was he financing Babylon? It could only fire once in anger before the retaliatory fighter-bombers blew it to bits, and it could only fire a satellite or a conventional shell.

It was in China, in the company of the sympathetic George Wong, that he cracked it. It was the last equation he would ever solve.

Chapter 2

The big Ram Charger sped down the main highway from Qatar toward Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, making good time. The air conditioning kept the interior cool, and the driver had some of his favorite country-and-western tapes filling the interior with back-home sounds.

Beyond Ruweis, they were out in open country, the sea to their left only intermittently visible between the dunes, to their right the great desert stretching away hundreds of bleak and sandy miles toward Dhofar and the Indian Ocean.

Beside her husband Maybelle Walker gazed excitedly at the ochre-brown desert shimmering under the midday sun. Ray Walker kept his eyes on the road. An oil man all his life, he had seen deserts before.

“Seen one, seen ’em all,” he would grunt when his wife made one of her frequent exclamations of wonderment at the sights and sounds that were so new to her.

But for Maybelle Walker it was all new, and although she had packed enough medications before leaving Oklahoma to open a new branch of Eckerd, she had loved every minute of her two-week tour of the Arabian Gulf—what used to be called the Persian Gulf.

They had started in the north in Kuwait, then driven the off-road loaned them by the company south into Saudi Arabia through Khafji and Al-Khobar, crossed the causeway into Bahrain, then back and down through Qatar and into the UAE. At each stopover Ray Walker had made a perfunctory “inspection” of his company office—the ostensible reason for the trip—while she had taken a guide from the company office and explored the local sights. She felt very brave going down all those narrow streets with only a single white man for an escort, unaware that she would have been in more danger in any of fifty American cities than among the Gulf Arabs.

The sights enthralled her on her first and perhaps last journey outside the United States. She admired the palaces and the minarets, wondered at the torrent of raw gold on display in the gold soukhs , and was awed by the tide of dark faces and multicolored robes that swirled about her in the Old Quarters.

She had taken photographs of everything and everyone so she could show the ladies’ club back home where she had been and what she had seen. She had taken to heart the warning by the company representative in Qatar to be careful of taking a picture of a desert Arab without his permission, as some still believed the taking of a photograph captured part of the target’s soul.

She was, she frequently reminded herself, a happy woman and had much to be happy about. Married almost straight out of high school to her steady date of two years, she found herself wedded to a good, solid man with a job in a local oil company who had risen through the ranks as the company expanded, until he was now finishing as one of the vice-presidents.

They had a nice home outside Tulsa and a beach house for summer vacations at Hatteras, between the Atlantic and Pamlico Sound in North Carolina. It had been a good thirty-year marriage, rewarded with one fine son. And now this, a two-week tour at the company’s expense of all the exotic sights and sounds, smells, and experiences of another world, the Arabian Gulf.

“It’s a good road,” she remarked as they crested a rise and the strip of bitumen shimmered and shivered away in front of them. If the temperature inside the vehicle was seventy degrees, it was one hundred and twenty out there in the desert.

“Ought to be,” her husband grunted. “We built it.”

“The company?”

“Nah. Uncle Sam, goddammit.”

Ray Walker had a habit of adding the single word goddammit when he dispensed pieces of information.

They sat for a while in companionable silence while Tammy Wynette urged her to stand by her man, which she always had done and intended to do through their retirement.

Nudging sixty, Ray Walker was taking retirement with a good pension and some healthy stock options, and a grateful company had offered him the two-week, all-expense-paid, first-class tour of the Gulf to

“inspect” its various outstations along the coast. Though he too had never been there before, he had to admit he was less enthralled by it all than his wife, but he was delighted for her sake.

Personally, he was looking forward to finishing with Abu Dhabi and Dubai, then catching the first-class cabin of an airliner aimed directly at the United States via London. At least he would be able to order a long, cold Bud without having to scuttle into the company office for it. Islam might be all right for some, he mused, but after staying in the best hotels in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and being told they were completely dry, he wondered what kind of a religion would stop a guy from having a cool beer on a hot day.

He was dressed in what he perceived to be the rig of an oil man in the desert—tall boots, jeans, belt, shirt, and Stetson—which was not entirely necessary, as he was really a chemist in quality control.

He checked the odometer: eighty miles to the Abu Dhabi turnoff.

“Gonna have to take a leak, honey,” he muttered.

“Well then, you be careful,” warned Maybelle. “There are scorpions out there.”