The Shroud of Heaven (35 page)

***

Saeed didn’t want to open his eyes; didn’t want to see the horror of his own premature burial. He was alive, no question about that, and was having no difficulty breathing. Aside from a scattering of bruises—some from falling debris but the most painful delivered courtesy of Kismet’s rifle butt—he sensed no dire injury, but that fact gave him little comfort. It was only a matter of time before he suffocated or perished from dehydration.

Strangely, when he wept, his tears were for his brother. Unfettered emotion poured from his breast. He had lived a lifetime of conflict with his own flesh and blood, and at the end, had twisted Farid’s deepest convictions to suit his own selfish ends. He was as guilty as the man whose actions had directly ended his brother’s life. The only solace he found in his dark tomb was that he and Farid would share this unmarked grave.

But then daylight fell upon his exposed face, rousing him from his despair with a golden warmth that felt like nothing less than the grace of God, and Saeed Tariq, filled with a new, divine purpose, opened his eyes.

***

They struck so quickly that Kismet almost jumped out of his chair. Two USAF F-16 Fighting Falcons thundering across the sky at Mach Three had approached from his six and done a precursory fly-by that felt close enough to scrape the paint from the Hind. He recovered his wits just in time to steady the stick as the combined jet wash of the two fighter planes buffeted the helicopter and momentarily sucked the air from its intakes.

“What the hell?” The fighters were mere specks against the azure backdrop, trailing a filament of smoke that gradually curled around as the two warplanes lined up for another pass. In classic wing formation, the two jets swung to the right and approached from Kismet’s three o’clock.

“Look!” Marie shrieked, stabbing a finger at the instrument panel. A large warning light was flashing, and although Kismet could make no sense of the markings, its ominous urgency was as plain as day.
Missile lock
!

Kismet looked frantically around the cockpit for a radio, wasting precious seconds in the futile search. The communications system was right in front of him, but without the headset and microphone, which were integrated into the pilot’s helmet, the device was useless.

“Incoming missile!” Marie screamed again. “Do something!”

He nodded. “I’ll put us down.”

A look of desperation twisted her glamorous countenance, then she abruptly turned away. Kismet let her go, focusing his attention on trying to get the Hind down onto the desert floor where they might, with a little luck, be able to abandon the aircraft before the missile turned it into a flaming ball of scrap. He pulled the cyclic back in order to hover, then cut the pitch to reduce lift until the helicopter started to plummet.

With a lurch that threw Kismet against the cylindrical side windscreen, the Hind abruptly turned into the path of the F-16s and shot forward. He tried to regain control, but the sticks and pedals fought his steady pressure, behaving as if the aircraft were being controlled remotely…or by another pilot.

Marie
?

He could barely hear her over the din of the engines, but once he realized where she was, he understood. Marie had climbed into the second cockpit, situated just above his own, and had commandeered control of the craft utilizing the redundant flight systems.

“Damn it,” he raged. Her hysteria was going to get them killed surer than any missile.

Only she wasn’t hysterical. Kismet stopped fighting the controls and watched with a mixture of horror and amazement as the Mi-25 raced headlong into the path of a supersonic missile. Suddenly a new noise joined the tumult. From either side of the helicopter, 12.7-millimeter rounds, every fifth one a green tracer, shot ahead of the helicopter from a pair of wing-mounted four-barreled Gatling guns.

Thousands of rounds spewed across the sky, forming a virtual veil of metal between the helicopter and the incoming AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. The projectile abruptly went out of control, venting exhaust from a pair of holes that had pierced the rocket body clear through. The Sidewinder corkscrewed wildly for a moment, then suddenly exploded well away from any of the aircraft.

A second missile was released an instant before both jets, now directly in the path of the Hind’s guns, peeled off and climbed skyward. The Sidewinder acquired them instantly, its thermal sensors fixing on the helicopters jet exhaust, but it was a tenuous lock. The Hind was equipped with passive countermeasures to mask its infrared signature and reduce its vulnerability to heat-seeking weapons, but it was still the hottest thing in the sky.

Kismet could only watch in horror as a dark speck trailing a finger of flame and smoke raced toward them. Abruptly, the nose of the helicopter swung up as if to follow the F-16s, and he lost sight of the missile. There was a roar from the side of the aircraft, louder than any gunshot, and for a moment, he was sure that it had struck, but then a ball of bright light shot out ahead of the Hind, leaping skyward as if to chase down the jet fighters.

Kismet was stunned. Marie had just unleashed one of the helicopter’s anti-tank rockets at the Air Force jets. Desperate though their situation was, no possible good could come of engaging the other aircraft. Not only was it unthinkable to Kismet that they should fire on American pilots, but the Hind was hopelessly outmatched. The 9M17 Skorpion missile—NATO designation AT-2 SWATTER—was a radio-controlled, operator-guided rocket designed to destroy mobile ground targets, which meant that a human operator had to keep the enemy lined up in cross-hairs that were integrated into his helmet visor until the projectile made contact. And because the best defense against the Swatter was evasion, it was of necessity a slow-moving weapon, which allowed the operator to make continual corrections. There was no way the missile would ever get close to a supersonic aircraft. All it would do was piss them off.

Then something unexpected happened. From below the helicopter, a streak of light like a thunderbolt blasted the Skorpion missile from the sky. The shockwave of the Sidewinder blowing apart the anti-tank rocket hammered the Hind and showered the windscreen with twisted bits of metal, but did no real damage. The Russian-made aircraft sailed through the debris cloud like a surfer pushing through a wave.

Kismet abandoned all thought of trying to wrestle control of the helicopter from Marie. He couldn’t imagine how she came to have such an intimate understanding of combat aviation, and didn’t care to question her on the subject. It was enough that she had kept them alive this long. He leaned forward in the cockpit, craning his head around to locate the F-16s.

The Hind reached the apex of its climb and heeled over, rolling into a shallow dive. Marie cut back the throttle and in the relative quiet, Kismet heard her shouting his name. He cautiously unbuckled his safety restraints and pulled himself out of the lower cockpit. Marie looked away from the desperate task at hand only long enough to thrust an oblong plastic object into his hands. It was a Qualcomm satellite telephone. Kismet didn’t need to be told what to do.

He dropped back into the cockpit and buckled in before activating the phone. It took him a moment to figure out how to access the menu of previously called numbers, but when he found it, a long list of contacts scrolled down the liquid crystal display. Several of the most recent, made within the last two days, were to the same number, which was odd because he couldn’t remember having seen her make or receive any calls. He muttered the digits twice, committing them to memory, then continued searching until he found a call made almost forty-eight hours previously to the UNMOVIC headquarters in New York. He selected the number and hit the send button.

On the instrument panel, the “missile warning” light began flashing again as the F-16s focused radar beams on their slippery prey. Kismet imagined that the pilot’s amazement at Marie’s evasive tactics was equal to his own. No doubt they had expected a very short and uneventful engagement. He and Marie had been lucky that the first volley had employed Sidewinder missiles; heat-seekers were easier to elude than—

The light went solid, and he knew that their luck had run out.

“You have reached the United Nations—” He hit ‘0’ to cut off the automated receptionist. There was a click followed by an electronic trill.

The Hind abruptly plunged earthward as Marie pulled out all the stops, but Kismet knew it wouldn’t be enough. The constant radar signal could only mean one thing: they were being hunted by radar guided missile, likely an AIM-120 Slammer Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile (AMRAAM), one of the most relentless aerial combat weapons in the modern arsenal. Faster even than the planes that carried it, the AMRAAM could be guided by the pilot for greatest efficiency or allowed to follow its internal targeting system. There were a few defenses against the AMRAAM, such as radar scattering chaff or nap of the earth flying, but the odds favored the hound over the fox.

Marie had taken the helicopter down almost to the level of the desert floor. Its rotors were stirring up a blinding whirlwind of sand in which arcs of static electricity danced like capering elemental demons. The missile lock warning did not flicker.

“United Nations. How may I direct your call?”

When he opened his mouth to answer, he was struck by the sheer ridiculousness of the request he was about to make. He had little doubt that the operator would simply hang up on an imagined prankster.
Oh well, it was a fool’s gambit anyway
. “This is Nick Kismet with UNESCO. I am in the desert west of Al Hillah, Iraq in a captured helicopter, taking friendly fire. I need to contact coalition air command immediately. This is a matter of life and death.”

The long pause at the other end was, he decided, a good sign.

Although it was impossible to see the projectile screaming after the Hind at Mach 4, Marie was nevertheless able to chart its approach on the helicopter’s active radar screen, a system which she had known how to activate. The AMRAAM did not have to actually make contact with its prey in order to destroy it. Rather it was the shock wave from the detonation of its forty pound high-explosive warhead at close proximity to the target that did the real damage. The AIM-120 needed only to get within about thirty meters to swat the helicopter out of the sky.

The radar showed only smooth desert in all directions. There would be no ducking behind a rock outcropping at the last instant to shield them from the blast. She pulled back on the cyclic, lifting skyward for a moment, just long enough to deploy a small grenade from a rear-facing launcher before diving toward the ground once more. The following blip on the radar screen abruptly vanished in what looked like a miniature snowstorm; the radio waves from the radar dome had been deflected away from the receiver by a shower of metallic chaff particles. Her triumph however was short lived. The missile burst from the haze and resumed the chase, closing on them like a sports car chasing down a runner. Marie watched it get closer… closer…and enter the kill zone.

She whipped the Hind sideways and increased pitch and throttle simultaneously so that the helicopter shifted in three dimensions away from the flight path of the Slammer. The warhead detonated at that instant, creating an expanding sphere of force as hard as concrete that pushed a wall of shrapnel toward the retreating aircraft. The underside of the Hind was hammered by a spray of debris, but only a few of the pieces actually pierced its armor. The shock wave was far more destructive.

“What was—” The operator’s inquiry was cut off as the sat phone flew from Kismet’s grasp and shattered against a bulkhead. Flailing for a handhold and slammed against his restraints, he barely noticed.

And then the helicopter leveled out and dived back down toward the dunes. Marie was still in control and they were still alive.
But three missiles! Even my luck’s not that good
.

Another light started blinking on the control panel, alongside a gauge which measured remaining fuel in pounds. The needle registered below the lowest mark. Shrapnel from the missile blast had evidently ripped through a fuel tank and the resulting hemorrhage had splashed their entire reserve supply across the desert sand. Before this fact could fully register, Kismet saw the missile-warning blink on again. All he could do was sit back and wait for the inevitable.

But Marie was not ready to give up. As a second AMRAAM drew close, she hauled back on the cyclic, executing a heavy-G turn that would have made the fighter pilots green with either envy or nausea. The Hind’s nose thrust skyward as it started to climb…and then everything went to hell.

The Mil helicopters of the Hind family had served the Russian military and its export partners well for more than twenty years and were virtually the equal of their western counterparts the Boeing AH-64 Apache and the Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk. But there was one design flaw which had plagued the helicopter in hostile engagements, most notably in Afghanistan where warriors of the Mujahideen had managed to hold their own in a decade long war of attrition against the superior technology of the Soviet superpower: the Hind had a nasty habit of cutting off its own tail.

When Marie threw the helicopter into its sharp climb, the rotor assembly tilted back to the furthest extreme so that the rotor vanes were whipping over the tail boom with mere millimeters to spare. But the G-forces changed that. The entire aircraft flexed, as if the helicopter was trying to climb a literal hill, and in that instant, the deadly arc of the main rotor passed
through
the tail boom. A horrific shudder vibrated through the craft, accompanied by an ear-splitting shriek of rending metal, and then the fuselage, no longer stabilized by the sideways turning blades of the rudder, began to whip violently around beneath the rotors. Kismet felt as though his eyes were being ripped from his skull. He was pinned against the web belts that held him in place, unable to do anything to relieve the pressure of the centrifuge. But he could tell they were falling and the AMRAAM was still chasing them.