Free Systemic Shock by Dean Ing

be no troop thrusts into Israel's debris until the radioactive wasteland had 'cooled' enough for selected motorized infantry advances. It might take a month, but the AIR could wait. They had waited and prayed for years toward this moment, a time when US/RUS and European eyes were focused on their own survival. Their prayers would be answered, imsh'Allah, on the morrow.
    At nine-fifteen PM, Israel's television and radio stations broadcast a bulletin to the effect that the bones of the patriarch Joseph had been positively identified. Some stations carried the item with a tongue-in-cheek waggishness—'what, again?'—but all carried it. Because Israelis, even those with deep-cover civil defense jobs, are as fallible as anybody, stations swamped with telephone calls found it necessary to repeat that the bones were indeed those of Joseph. The ensuing uproar down the length of Israel was immediate; citizens spread the salient news from house to house. By ten PM, darkness hid the dust of the first cargo ACV to thrumm west from Hazeva, loaded to its rubbery skirts with the only cargo Israel considered indispensable.
    Monitors in the Sinai and elsewhere informed AIR leaders of the activity, but nothing was done with the information. The Jews, it was felt, were only making genocide easier.
    Of the one hundred thousand ACV's that massed along the Plain of Sharon between Tel Aviv and Haifa from midnight to three AM, only a few thousand had needed to traverse much more than two hundred klicks of sand. Last-minute maintenance and refueling proceeded with less than the expected attrition rate, thanks to people like Irina Konolev, her mind and fingers flying as she allocated fuel and personnel from her portable computer terminal in Netanya.
    Fleetingly, Irina thought of her plain-featured, stolid boss, the family man with the big laugh who was also the colonel with the big responsibility. She hoped he would still be laughing at dawn; she would not have been surprised to learn that Colonel ben Arbel lay in a personnel pod as his vertol flashed over wavetops of the Red Sea. She might have grinned, had she known that the knot of McDonnells had passed muster at the enemy IFF query near Tiran by flawlessly surrogating an Indian Air Force response. Ben Arbel, in the second wave of vertols, arced inland south of Yanbu while the first wave was converging on another target to the south. The targets were wholly insignificant from a strict military point of view; but as political prizes they were crucial.
    At three-oh-three AM, a series of temblors was recorded in the shallow Mediterranean southwest of Beirut. Lebanon and Syria braced for tidal waves that would not come, because the temblors had been initiated by sonic generators in rock far below the seabed ooze. On Cyprus, now an island province of Turkey, the wave could be seen approaching on radar. It was very high, and it stretched to the horizon. Cypriots from Limassol to Cape Greco were wakened and warned to abandon the southern coastline. Cyprus had felt tidal waves before; everyone knew that even a low wave could become huge as it mounted island shallows. Cypriot radar was watching something that wasn't there; one operational mode of Israel's most secret weapon, a microwave ghost that could make radar strain at gnats while swallowing camels.
    The face of the wave approached Cyprus behind the ghost image at two hundred klicks per hour. It was composed of the fastest fifty thousand Israeli ACV's in close formation, followed at whatever speed they could muster by the remaining transports. The wave did not break against Cyprus's beaches; much of it continued inland for some distance before settling to disgorge literally millions of passengers—most of Israel's population. Israel had given technical aid to Turkey in return for a secret promise that Cyprus would accept refugees, but the Turks had been given no details on just how that exodus might occur.
    The code phrase for the operation was