The Shroud of Heaven (34 page)

They made it as far as the door to Laboratory Three, the crucible where Chiron’s betrayal had nearly proved fatal, before the militants noticed them. With no effective cover, Kismet chose the best possible defense. “Run!”

Bullets exploded against the cavern walls and showered them with chips of stone. Kismet felt something small and hard smack into his thigh, probably a ricochet, but kept moving in spite of the dull ache that began spreading from the point of impact. Then they reached the tunnel to the helicopter hangar and left the battle behind. The respite was brief.

As they reached the top of the passage, Marie’s arm snapped up alongside him, the pistol seeming like a natural extension of her hand, and squeezed off two shots. Kismet’s eyes had only just registered the presence of yet another Arab gunman standing in their path, when two red flowers blossomed on his chest. A third shot drilled a hole between his eyes before Kismet could bring his rifle up.

Kismet stared in stunned disbelief as the gunman dropped to his knees and pitched forward. Then the concussion of automatic rifle fire, accompanied by an eruption of stone chips from the wall behind him, returned his focus to the urgency of their situation. He sprawled forward, unconsciously pulling Marie down as well, and began crawling toward the parked helicopter.

He hadn’t seen the second shooter in his initial survey of the spacious cavern, but there were a lot of places to hide and the shots had ceased as soon as he dived for cover. “Where is he?”

Marie shook her head as she ejected the magazine from her pistol and fed in a full one. “I didn’t see. But the rest of them will be coming up the tunnel soon.”

Kismet’s only reply was a grimace. He glanced around, looking for the unseen sniper, but his gaze fell on something else instead. “I’ve got an idea. Cover me.”

He half-expected her to protest, but she gave a terse nod and rolled into a prone firing position, with the pistol locked in a two-handed grip. On that tacit signal, Kismet rose to a crouch and dashed toward the rows of drums off to the left. When the gunman opened fire, peppering the wall behind the fuel dump with 7.62-mm rounds, he dropped again.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea,” he murmured. But then he heard the distinctive pop of Marie’s pistol over the roar of the AK-47. The latter weapon fell silent first.

Without waiting for further prompting, he tipped one of the drums onto its side and commenced rolling it toward the mouth of the tunnel. Marie was on her feet again, with her back pressed against the Hind-D and her pistol at the ready. “Got him.”

Kismet withheld praise, focusing instead on the task at hand. He shoulder-slung his captured AK and drew his
kukri
. Using the heavy blade like a can opener, he hacked into the drum lid, cutting several triangular holes that immediately began to spew hi-grade petroleum. As the noxious fumes assaulted his mucous membranes, he pulled the lump of Semtex from his pocket and pressed it into one of the holes, then gave the drum a kick that sent it rumbling down the tunnel. The container traveled only as far as the first bend in the passage—about twenty meters—before coming to rest against the wall, but it continued to vomit jet fuel onto the sloping passage.

“Stand back!” He unlimbered the Kalashnikov and held its muzzle close to the pool of flammable liquid. A short pull on the trigger was all it took to ignite the substance, and with a whoosh, the entire passage filled with flame. For just a moment, he thought he could hear screams echoing up from the depths, but decided it was just his imagination.

Suddenly, the ground heaved under his feet and simultaneously, a pillar of smoke and dust exploded from the tunnel opening. The burning trail of jet fuel was snuffed out like a candle flame. Kismet was back on his feet in an instant, running for the side hatch of the helicopter. He threw open the door and turned to admonish Marie to get in, but the words died in his throat. The Frenchwoman seemed to be aiming her pistol right at him….

No. Someone behind me
?
In the helo
?

When she did not fire, he took a sideways step, bringing his own weapon up as he turned. A robed figure, swathed in a
kefiya
wrapped Bedouin-style around both head and neck, stood in opening, his hands raised in surrender. Kismet’s finger tightened on the trigger instinctively, but he checked his fire. The man was unarmed and seemed to pose no threat. And there was something familiar about his eyes…

Kismet reversed the rifle in his hands and stabbed the wooden stock of the weapon into the man’s abdomen. As the Arab doubled over, he followed through with a butt-stroke to the back of the turbaned head. The stranger collapsed onto the stone floor beneath the extended rotor blades and did not move. With a greater degree of caution, Kismet quickly checked the interior of the Hind gun ship before encouraging Marie to join him inside. The mystery of the unarmed Arab stowaway would have to be left behind with him.

As he settled into the pilot’s seat in the lower cockpit, surrounded by banks of switches, gauges and indicator lights, the enormity of the final phase of his audacious escape plan finally hit him. The control panels were marked in Cyrillic characters, with Arabic equivalents painted in white alongside, but even though Kismet had a good grasp of Russian and a decent comprehension of the predominant language of the Iraqi people, the labels might as well have been written in ancient Sumerian cuneiform. He sensed that Marie was right behind him, silently goading him to take action, and clenched his fists to steel his nerve. Starting from the right, he began flipping switches—all of them. One by one, different systems of the aircraft became active and corresponding indicators on the panel began to glow. One of the toggles caused an audible grinding sound to vibrate through the fuselage before flipping back to the “off” position.

He eyed the lever to the side of his chair. It was actually two controls in one. By raising or lowering it, much like the hand brake in an automobile, he could adjust the pitch of the rotor blades, but it was also a twist throttle control. He tried the starter switch again, this time opening the throttle gently as he did. The grinding noise repeated, then turned into a steady vibration. Above his head, the main rotor began to turn, ever so slowly. Kismet risked a triumphant grin in Marie’s direction, then continued flipping the remaining switches.

“It’s fortunate that you know how to fly this thing,” she commented.

Kismet gave a chuckle as he feathered the throttle. “That may be overstating my abilities.”

He could tell by her long silence that she was wrestling with his comment, perhaps trying to determine if there was some idiomatic trick at work or a joke so thickly disguised as to elude her sense of humor. When she finally spoke again, it was with the caution of someone entering a minefield. “You have flown a helicopter?”

The five blades of the rotor assembly were now whipping by too fast to be seen by the naked eye, further disturbing the smoke and dust in the air of the cavern.

“Sort of,” he confessed, trying not to burden her with his inadequacy as a pilot. “This one is a little different than…well, what I’m used to.”

The awful truth of the matter was that he did not know how to fly a helicopter. But for one brief and ultimately cataclysmic experience, he had never sat in the pilot’s chair. Nevertheless, he had spent many hours in the sky and had always made it a point to pay close attention to what the flight crews did. He knew the controls by heart, and had a pretty good idea when to be aggressive and when to use a light touch.

He checked the RPM gauge; it was climbing steadily, but was still well away from the red zone. The roar of the engine and the rapid thump of the rotors beating the air filled the small cabin with a deep cacophony. He increased the throttle a little more, then eased up on the collective. The craft wobbled beneath him as the rotor vanes began pushing air, seemingly lightening the helicopter. He added a little more pitch, then continued gently adding more throttle until the Hind began to rise.

Now was the most critical moment. In the close quarters of the cavern, the slightest mistake might send the helicopter careening into the walls. He kept one hand on the cyclic—the control stick between his knees that tilted the rotor assembly to provide directional movement—and pushed the throttle a little further.

He felt a surge of adrenaline as the nose dipped, but before he could do anything to correct the problem, the Hind leveled out, hovering about five meters above the stone surface. Kismet glanced out the side window. Indirect daylight continued to pour in through the spacious opening more than fifteen meters above and to his left. With his confidence growing, Kismet experimented with the rudder pedals and succeeded in swiveling the aircraft on its rotor axis so that its nose was pointed directly at the wall below the opening. He then raised the pitch a little more, and the Hind gently ascended toward the roof of the cavern.

He threw Marie another grin, realizing only then that she had been holding her breath and gripping the back of his headrest. “This isn’t so hard after all.”

Then everything began moving, and no matter how he moved the controls, he couldn’t stop the chaos.

No one remained alive in the laboratory complex. The survivors of the gun battle had, to a man, been caught in the conflagration in the tunnel or crushed by the ensuing blast of jet fuel and plastic explosives. But their fate had been kinder than that suffered by Farid and his one remaining companion, trapped in Laboratory Two. The steadily rising temperature in the lab had killed them in a matter of minutes, but viewed through the window of a man prematurely experiencing hell, it must have seemed an eternity.

When the temperature reached a relatively low forty-two degrees Celsius, the enzymes essential to their continued existence began to denaturalize and brain death followed swiftly. By this time, neither of the men were conscious. Their body moisture had been completely leeched away, leading first to delirium, and then stupor. Both the joy of discovering fully functional nuclear detonators, and the terror of realizing that they were going to be cooked alive, faded into darkness as the men collapsed on the searing hot floor and thought no more. The temperature continued to climb.

Gradually, the combustible materials in the lab began to darken and smolder. The wooden crates burned without igniting, while the foam packing material and plastic cartons liquefied, releasing clots of acrid black smoke. And then, without warning, it was all swept away.

Although more than fifteen minutes remained on the timer that would activate the Semtex charges left behind by the French commandos, the increasing temperature in Laboratory Two, where Rebecca had placed an unusually large amount of the Czech-produced explosive, had been steadily conducting energy, in the form of heat, through the thin insulation that surrounded the detonator wire. Finally, it was enough to trigger the blasting cap and ignite the Semtex.

A massive explosion blasted the heavy door clear across the main complex and into the opposing wall. In that same instant, the rest of the charges planted throughout the facility went off simultaneously. In the space of a single second, an explosive force equal to a hundred kilograms of TNT, was released in the relatively confined environment of the cavern system. All that energy had to go somewhere. The shock wave splintered the stone walls of the cavern, turning the smallest fissures into gaping faults. The ceiling crumbled inward, and the earth began to move.

***

In a rush of comprehension, Kismet realized what was happening and what he had to do. With a smooth efficiency that belied his lack of expertise, he raised the collective and pushed forward on the cyclic control. The Mi-25 seemed to leap through the open mouth of the tunnel, passing over the motionless body of the sniper Marie had dispatched on his perch high above the floor.

Suddenly, their way was blocked by a wall of shivering stone, rushing ever closer. Kismet reflexively pulled back on the stick, and the helicopter abruptly lurched backward and rose out of the canyon, into the blazing early morning sun. He centered the cyclic stick and leveled the craft into a hover above the bare plateau, more to steady his nerves than anything else.

Two bare-headed men were struggling to stand as the surface on which they stood crumbled away into the narrow crevasse from which the Hind had just emerged. There was no one else in sight. Kismet left them to their fate and turned his attention to the horizon. The featureless desert spread out as far as the eye could see, in every direction.

“Where are we?” Marie was almost shouting in his ear to be heard.

He glanced at the control panel, identifying something that looked like a compass, but other than their immediate orientation, it offered little enlightenment. He had no clue how to make use of the aircraft’s avionics package or any of its other systems. “We can’t be too far from Babylon.” He searched his memory of the region’s geography. “If we head northeast, we’re bound to intersect the Euphrates at some point.”

Marie’s nod of encouragement was all he needed. He brought the Hind onto the desired heading and accelerated across the desert. Confronted by the stillness of the wasteland and wrapped in the cloak of ambient noise from the jet engines, he was finally able to process the flood of revelations that had turned his perception of reality upside-down. Now that the danger was finally past, he could try to begin to make sense of Chiron’s betrayal and everything else he had witnessed from that point forward.

***

One hundred and fifty miles to the south, a similarly imponderable mystery was being contemplated. A senior airman of the United States Air Force, operating the radar station aboard an E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) stared in disbelief at the blip which had abruptly appeared on her screen. A few swift keystrokes verified that the object illuminated by pulses of Doppler radar was indeed an aircraft and that it was not returning the standard “friendly” signal. The airman squinted at the screen a moment longer, waiting for the computer to give a more conclusive identification, and when it finally returned that there was an eighty-two percent likelihood that the contact was a Russian-made Mil gun ship, from the family of helicopters bearing the NATO designation “HIND,” she spoke a phrase that had gone almost unheard during the preceding weeks of war: “We have a bogey!”