The Shroud of Heaven (36 page)

Marie’s desperate maneuver had bought them a few more seconds. The missile’s momentum had carried it past the aircraft without detonating, and although it never lost its lock, the projectile had to travel several kilometers in order to swing around and home in on the stricken Hind.

Somehow, Marie managed to boost the throttle in tandem with the jet engines, pushing the helicopter’s thrust until its airspeed was more than seventy knots. For just a moment, the Mi-25 leveled out and control was regained. The force of onrushing air against the fuselage straightened their attitude like a weathervane in a stiff wind. It was the only appropriate response to the loss of a tail rotor, but it didn’t allow for a lot of maneuverability. About all they could do was stay aloft until the AMRAAM caught them.

The needle on the instrument panel registered their rapid descent. Marie was trying to put the helicopter down. Maybe there was still a chance. But then the turbines coughed and fell silent. The last of the fuel had been consumed. Although the rotors continued to turn, grinding out their considerable momentum, they were nevertheless powering down. Kismet could feel the fuselage begin to twist with the torque and all of a sudden it was gyrating again. The Hind auto-rotated, unable to sustain lift, but plummeted more like a feather than a stone. Kismet mentally braced himself for impact. There was nothing he could do to prepare physically.

When it finally came, the crash seemed almost anti-climactic. Marie had retracted the landing gear before beginning the aerobatic evasive maneuvers, but had deployed the wheels to help stabilize the craft once the rudder was gone. The shock absorbers in the struts absorbed most of the impact and the sand helped dissipate the rest. Still, gravity remained a force to be reckoned with, and when the Hind slammed into the desert floor, the force crumpled the fuselage and pounded down on its occupants like a pile driver. Still, Kismet reckoned it no worse than the five static line parachute jumps he had made to earn his Airborne wings as an ROTC cadet. Incredibly, they had survived a helicopter crash.

But before either of them could make a move to extricate themselves from the ill-fated craft, a second impact blasted against them, followed by a shock wave, and then darkness.

It was impossible to tell if he had lost consciousness. The last thing he remembered was the darkness and it remained the only constant. He blinked—no change—then reached out to see if his hands encountered anything. After a few moments of searching, he found the cyclic stick, right where it ought to be.

Well, that’s a good sign. But why is it so dark in here
?

More probing revealed that he was still strapped in to his chair, and that it was tilted over until it was nearly horizontal; the helicopter had come to rest on its left side. It took some more doing, but he managed to locate his
kukri
and sever the straps, at which point he fell against the interior bulkhead.

“Marie?” The sound of his voice in the benighted silence was a little unnerving. “Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

“I…I am not hurt.” Her words sounded as cautious as he felt. “At least. I believe I am uninjured.”

He followed the sound of her voice, crawling along the canted wall until he could hear the sound of her breathing. As he drew closer, he remembered that he still had some of the Cyalume sticks in his waist pack. “I’m going to give us some light. Cover your eyes for a moment.”

In the pale green glow of the chem-light, he saw her, suspended in the flight chair like a prisoner enduring some kind of grisly torture. He cut her free and eased her onto the bulkhead. Beyond the bubble windows of her cockpit, there was a dull gray nothingness.

“What happened?”

Kismet moved closer to the Perspex windscreen. “I think we got buried somehow. Maybe we hit a soft dune and it collapsed over us. Or maybe that last missile hit close enough to make the sand behave like a liquid.”

“Buried?” Marie echoed hollowly.

“We’re lucky it didn’t pulverize us.” He turned to her and smiled reassuringly. “Hey, you saved us. You picked a hell of a good time to come out of your shell.”

But his intended encouragement had the wrong effect. She gazed at him for a moment, an emerald moistness gathering at the corners of her eyes, then burst into uncontrollable sobs. Kismet held her tightly, grateful that she had managed to delay her breakdown as long as she had.

***

Things got better once Kismet succeeded in opening one of the door panels. He chose the one on the left, what was now the bottom surface of the helicopter, correctly reasoning that there would be no external pressure weighing against it, nor a deluge of suffocating sand as soon as it was drawn back. With the coarse desert earth thus revealed, he set to work digging with the blade of his Gurkha knife. It was a tedious and frustrating task. They scooped sand by the handful into the interior of the aircraft, but the hole kept refilling itself as more grains collapsed in from the sides.

“So why didn’t you tell me you could fly that helicopter?” he inquired, offhandedly. He didn’t want Marie to know the desperation that he now felt. If he couldn’t dig them out, the Hind would be their tomb.

“You seemed to know what you were doing,” she answered, almost sheepishly. “I didn’t want to interfere.”

“I’m glad you did. But where did you learn to fly like that? That was combat flying. Don’t try to tell me you learned that at some weekend flight school.”

She gave a wan smile, looking almost sickly in the glow of the chem-light. “I was in the military as a young woman.”

“Forgive me for saying it, but you don’t seem the type.”

“It was required.”

Kismet paused in his labors to ponder this. France had a policy of compulsive military service dating back almost a century, but it applied almost exclusively to males of eligible age. In recent years, the policy had been changed to promote other forms of civil service in order to professionalize the armed forces, and additionally to include females as well, but the years of Marie’s service must surely have predated that. “I thought the law applied only to men.”

She blinked at him. “Forgive me, I misspoke. What I meant was that it was necessary for me to serve in the military in order to reach other goals. I showed an aptitude for aviation and was trained as a helicopter pilot. I hated it.”

He nodded slowly and resumed digging, but now that Marie had regained a degree of composure, she took her turn asking questions. “Nick, what happened back there?”

It was the question he had been dreading; answering it would mean accepting some very difficult truths. “Pierre… I don’t know why, but he shut us in that lab.”

“Deliberately?”

Kismet nodded. “Maybe he didn’t know about the self-destruct, but he shut us in and made no effort to help us get out.”

“And where did he go afterward?”

“We were followed by another group. I think they might have been spies or an elite commando force. Pierre was working with them all along.” He stopped speaking as the gravity of what he was saying finally hit home. “He played me for a fool. All that talk about religious artifacts was a diversion to keep me interested, so that I would lead them to what they were really after.”

“And what was that?”

No harm in telling her
. “French-made nuclear detonators.”

She let out a gasp. “There were nuclear weapons in there?”

“They weren’t armed. Pierre seemed to know all about the deal the French government made with Iraq years ago. Nuke technology for oil leases. I guess they were afraid someone would find out what they had done.”

“Did they take the detonators with them?”

It was an odd question, enough so that Kismet stopped digging. “It didn’t look like it. I think they just wanted to destroy them.”

She seemed satisfied with that. “And what of the second group? The men that killed Hussein?”

“Insurgents. I’m sure there are quite a few high-level officers who know about that place still on the loose. Maybe they were hoping to find a weapons cache or something.”

She nodded again and at that instant the sand where Kismet was digging suddenly fell away, disappearing into a newly opened funnel. There was a gleam of daylight beyond. Heartened, he jumped down into the hole and made an abrupt transition into the desert heat. Shading his eyes with a hand, he looked back to find that the gap had already been covered over with sliding sand. Part of the main rotor shaft—the blades evidently broken off during the crash—extended from the side of a massive sand dune, but that was the only sign that a helicopter had gone down in the desert. The Hind was completely buried.

“Marie!” He climbed back up the hill searching for hole. As if to answer his summons, the Frenchwoman abruptly burst from the wall in front of him and tumbled down the slope. He tried to catch her, but the uncertain terrain upon which he stood crumbled away and they both rolled to the bottom of the gully entangled like lovers. Kismet felt her shaking in his arms and thought she was crying again. It took him a moment to realize that she was laughing.

He joined her mirth for more than a minute, but when their peals of gaiety gradually stopped echoing through the dune canyons, the oppressive reality of their new peril settled in. The desert was perhaps not as hot a furnace as the one from which they had escaped in Laboratory Three, but its death sentence was no less immutable. The sun was only beginning its climb into the eastern sky, and already the temperature was soaring. To make matters worse, they were both severely dehydrated from their earlier ordeal and had no means of replenishing their bodily reserves. Kismet sat back on the simmering sand and began reviewing their options. It was a short list.

“As I see it, we have two choices. We can continued north on foot and pray that we find water before we collapse. Or we can stay here and hope that someone sends a group out to investigate our helicopter.”

“How likely is that?”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “If I were calling the shots, I’d want to know who was flying a gunship across the desert. Remember, Saddam, his sons, and most of his generals are still on the run. But that helo is hidden pretty well. They may already have flown over and not seen it. If that’s the case, then we’ll die for sure if we stay.”

Marie gazed across a landscape shimmering with convection waves. “We’ve come so far, survived so much. It cannot end like this. I say we take our chances in the wilderness.”

Her determination, however naïve, was inspirational. But the oppressive mid-morning sun quickly prompted a compromise. They would seek the shelter of the crashed helicopter until dusk, making the desert trek in the cool of evening. They spent the better part of an hour in excavating a passage back into the buried aircraft, after which Kismet began ransacking the Hind in search of anything that might improve their odds of survival. Unfortunately, the Iraqis had not provisioned the aircraft for the eventuality of a crash in the desert. There were no water cans or foodstuffs to be found, nor any extra garments or blankets to ward off exposure. A first-aid kit yielded a roll of gauze bandages and a Mylar film space blanket, but that was the extent of their supplies. Anything else would be the product of salvage and ingenuity.

There was enough fabric in the seat cushions to fashion a pair of rudimentary turbans, and after swathing one of these around his head, Kismet ventured once more into the open. Reckoning that their most immediate need was water, he began fashioning a solar still to reclaim a few precious drops of moisture out of the air. He began by digging a shallow pit, which he covered with the space blanket. The reflective film was a poor choice for what he wanted—a piece of clear plastic would have been ideal—but he had to work with what he had. Like a miniature greenhouse, the Mylar helped create a super-heated pocket of air, which in turn caused condensation to form on the inside of the blanket. A small weight tied in the center helped the dew-like droplets to run down into a receptacle, in this case the empty plastic box which had held the first-aid kit, but the yield was pitifully small. There was barely enough water after two hours to moisten their parched lips.

Aside from that, they did little else during that long day. It had been more than twenty-four hours since either of them had slept, and the trials they had faced leading up to their escape into the wasteland had left them fatigued beyond the limits of human endurance, but even rest in the oven-like confines of their shelter was exhausting. Finally, when neither of them could stand inaction any longer, they struck out across the dunes. Huddled beneath the foil-like space blanket to ward off the worst of the sun’s wrath, they commenced trekking in the waning hours of the afternoon.

No words were exchanged during that forced march—no complaints were made, nor any encouragement given. Marie had evidently found a reserve of heretofore untapped energy and kept up with Kismet without any cajoling, but that pace was barely a crawl. Not only was their speed pitiful, but to ensure that they were not wandering in circles, Kismet had to make frequent pauses to check their heading. Without a compass, or even a trustworthy wristwatch, he had to use the shadow stick method; he would place his knife upright in the sand and mark the tip of the shadow. Ten minutes later, he would check again, and a line drawn between the two gave a fairly accurate east to west reference. It was tedious and time consuming, but it was at least a guarantee that they were still moving toward their goal.

By nightfall, Kismet was reeling from the effects of dehydration. Having only just recovered from heat exhaustion, he knew that he was particularly at risk for a second bout, and this time it would undoubtedly prove fatal. As the heat of day boiled away into space following dusk, he could feel the fever raging within his flesh. Still he marched on.

Without the shadows to guide him, he looked instead to the stars. Celestial navigation at least could be performed while in motion. Their rate of progress however continued to slow. Pressed together with the Mylar blanket pulled tight around their shoulders, they moved at a shuffle, each trusting the other to stay upright. Ultimately, neither one could recall who fell first. They collapsed together, shivering against the cold and embracing like lovers, and waited for the end to come.