The Shroud of Heaven

by Sean Ellis

  “Monsieur Kismet?”

  Despite the buzz of noise circulating through the terminal, Kismet distinctly heard his name and began looking for the person who had spoken. The voice had been feminine and accented—French, he determined, based on nothing more than the choice of honorific and the lapsed pronunciation of the last syllable: “Kis-may.” He stopped moving, waiting for the caller to present herself.

  A petite figure stepped forward, her hair and facial features concealed by a black combat helmet. Her stature was such that he found himself looking down at the top of her headgear. He ducked to get a better look at her face. “Je suis Nick Kismet,” he replied, correcting her pronunciation.

  She looked up at him, blinking as if in incomprehension. “Bonjour, monsieur. This way please.”

  She turned away before Kismet could commit her features to memory, but his initial impression was one of haughtiness. Twice in one day, he thought, shaking his head. What is it with me and French women?

  He knew that his generalization was not quite fair. She had done nothing to earn such an accusation. He was simply projecting the leftover ire from his encounter with the woman on the plane.

  He had seen enough to know that his guide was an attractive woman, with the sort of angular features common to European runway models. Though only a stray lock of her dark hair had been visible, sneaking out across her right cheek, it stood in stark contrast to her pale skin, as did her immaculate crimson lipstick. Perhaps her expression was not so much one of arrogance as an unconscious declaration that she did not belong in this place. Shaking his head, he followed after her receding form.

  He had gone only two steps when a familiar cry rolled through the crowd. “Incoming!”

  He reacted without thinking, echoing the message at the top of his voice though unaware that he was doing so, and launched himself forward. There was no hesitation; this was a lesson learned so deeply as to almost become instinctual. The woman was just starting to respond when Kismet grabbed her arm, pulled her down and covered her with his torso. As an afterthought, he held the duffel bag over his head, reasoning that the armor equipment inside would afford a degree of protection from whatever was about to happen.

  With adrenaline coursing through his veins, Kismet could not accurately judge the flow of time. It seemed that several minutes had passed without anything else happening. The only sounds he could hear were the extraordinarily loud percussions of his own heartbeat.

  And then the earth moved.

  The blast felt like a slap from God, yet Kismet knew he was experiencing only the outer edge of the shockwave: a bubble of displaced air pushed away from the detonation. In the same instant, the roar of the explosion washed over him. There was a deafening rush of noise that brought with it a shower of sand particles and shattered clay bricks.

  Through the ringing inside his head, he could distinguish the staccato pops of gunfire. The soldiers were mounting a counterattack against the perceived source of the threat. Kismet doubted the young infantrymen knew where to direct their fire. Most were probably shooting at anything that moved, but in the omnidirectional hailstorm of metal-jacketed ball ammunition, the odds did not favor the unseen enemy. He risked a look.

  The wall of the terminal had taken a direct hit, leaving an enormous wound in the brick structure. Through the hole and the thick curtain of smoke and dust, Kismet could see the battle in progress, the young soldiers alternately firing and advancing across the tarmac toward the outer perimeter of the airport, several hundred meters away. The aircraft which had brought him across the desert sands sat impotent and vulnerable, only a stone’s throw from the blast radius.

  Adrenaline was still distorting his perception of time, giving him a strange clarity of thought. He became aware of the news crews, rushing forward as if invincible in order to capture scenes of the battle on videotape. Their eagerness seemed ghoulish, but Kismet knew that in their own way, they were as dedicated as the soldiers fighting the battle on both sides. The journalists were true believers in the cause of history. If that explained their enthusiasm, it did not entirely excuse them. Most of the world’s problems could be laid at the feet of the true believers.

  The focus of the battle seemed to shift, and Kismet saw a white finger of vapor reaching out across the paved runway. RPG, he thought. A rocket-propelled grenade.

  Even as the munition was released it gave away the location of its user, and in a heartbeat, the place from which it had originated became the primary target for the soldiers. But no amount of retaliatory fire could alter the trajectory of the grenade as it streaked toward the terminal. Kismet covered his unnamed companion once more, waiting for the inevitable explosive climax.

  The RPG streaked past the nose of the idle jet, missing it by less than ten meters, and slammed into the wall of the terminal, just to the left of the first impact. The orderly matrix of bricks blew apart in a rough circle, showering the interior of the building with deadly fragments. Kismet saw several people struck, some seriously, by the debris. Closer to the blast, a section of the wall that had initially survived intact, now teetered inward and collapsed as a single massive entity onto a group of huddling relief workers and soldiers.

  Disdaining his own safety, Kismet sprang erect and darted across the terminal. Chaos had replaced the orderliness of the greeting area. Shrapnel and brick splinters were everywhere, and some who had survived with only minor injuries, or perhaps none at all, now rushed back and forth across the terminal in search of safety. Most simply remained flat on the ground, awaiting the next blast that might finish them all.

  A number of figures struggled from the outer edge of the collapsed wall. Kismet caught a glimpse of red hair and instantly recognized the woman from the plane. Her expression remained purposeful as she turned back toward the devastated tableau, immediately plunging her hands into the debris to effect the rescue of her comrades. He was at her side a moment later, lending the strength of his legs and back to the effort of lifting the wall. This time, she did not spurn his presence.

  Working together, they shifted a section of wall nearly two-meters square, partially revealing two motionless forms: a US soldier and one of the Red Cross workers. Kismet dug at a scattering of bricks that still pinned the legs of the latter individual, enough so that the woman was able to slip her hands beneath the fallen aid worker's shoulders in order to drag him to safety.

  Kismet blinked in disbelief. The woman, ostensibly dedicated to bringing relief to victims of the war, had helped rescue a single individual—her own friend—before fleeing the disaster area. Shaking off his incredulity, he plunged into the ruin once more, pushing aside large chunks of the wall to reveal other victims in dust-streaked camouflage. Another section of the wall, twice as large as the piece he had helped move, had fallen inward, crushing several more unlucky souls. It seemed unlikely that anyone could have endured its massive collapse, but Kismet had witnessed survival stories far more improbable.

  He was closer now to the perimeter of the terminal, and able to follow the battle raging outside on the tarmac. The infantrymen were advancing toward the position from which the grenades had been launched, filling the air with bursts of gunfire. He couldn’t tell if they were taking fire but the soldiers were staying low in order to present as small a target as possible. Kismet gave the situation a cursory glance, but kept his focus on driving wedge-shaped pieces of debris under the outermost lip of the fallen wall, forcibly raising it, if only by microscopic increments.

  Abruptly, the pitch of the skirmish seemed to change. Kismet looked up from his task, anxious that yet another RPG had been unleashed. Instead of a grenade however, he saw something far more destructive racing toward his position.

  In that instant he realized that the grenade attack had simply been a diversion, a feint designed to engage the troops and draw them away from the terminal. The advance had opened a gap in their flank, allowing a single vehicle to break through the outer secure perimeter of the airport, onto the tarmac.
At the same instant, gunfire—Kismet recognized the distinctive report of the AK-47—from no less than three separate locations began showering the exposed soldiers, compelling them to dive for cover and effectively preventing them from firing on that lone automobile. Kismet knew instantly the purpose behind the driver’s suicidal attempt to reach the terminal and recognized just as surely that none of the men on the tarmac would be able to stop it. When that car, or rather car bomb, reached the idle jetliner, the battle would be over for everyone. The soldiers on the runway and every soul in the exposed terminal building would be caught in the ensuing firestorm.

  With a deftness acquired through weeks of training—and like bicycle riding, never quite forgotten—Kismet snatched a long object from the shoulder of a fallen trooper, removed the safety pin and rolled the cylinder onto his shoulder. The AT-4 anti-tank weapon was only slightly different than the LAW 80 he had learned to use a decade earlier, and a brief glance at the instructions printed on the side of the tube was all he needed to prepare the launcher for firing. A tilt of his head brought the target into view in the peep-sight.

  “Backblast clear!” He glanced quickly to his rear, checking to make sure that anyone close enough to have heard his shouted warning was hastening away from the area, then thumbed the red trigger button.

  The launch tube filled with fire as the solid propellant rocket motor blasted the 80-millimeter high-explosive warhead across the tarmac. A cone-shaped inferno blossomed behind Kismet—the rocket’s backblast—and an ear-splitting hiss filled the enclosed terminal building as the missile broke the sound barrier.

  The car was less than fifty meters from the jet, close enough, Kismet knew, to ignite the fuel in its wing tanks if enough explosives had been packed into the station wagon. The vehicle was a fast-moving target, difficult to strike even in the best of circumstances. To make matters worse, he knew that in the unlikely event of a direct hit, the anti-tank missile would trigger the car bomb, accomplishing the very thing he sought to prevent. All of those factors had flashed through his mind in the instant he fixed his sights not on the advancing vehicle but on a stationary spot on the runway directly in its path.

  The warhead slammed into the paved surface before Kismet could relax his finger, and gouged a large crater in the soft asphalt a mere whisper ahead of the car’s arrival. What the missile lacked in pyrotechnic splendor, it made up for in raw kinetic energy. The shockwave swept underneath the station wagon, lifting its front end off the runway and tossing the entire vehicle backward like a sheet of paper in a windstorm.

  In that instant, the car detonated in a brilliant supernova. The chassis swelled like an overripe fruit then burst apart in a spray of metal fragments, some still recognizable as automobile components. The shockwave from the secondary explosion radiated outward in a near perfect sphere of force to hammer against the defenseless plane. The wings shuddered and the airframe twisted and popped as a wall of air, hard as steel and moving at the speed of sound, slammed into the fuselage. The jet shifted sideways, pushed by the invisible hand of the blast, and its tires left long streaks of rubber on the runway. An instant later a wheel from the car crashed into the stabilizer fin, followed by a spray of shrapnel that tore into the aluminum skin of the aircraft, peeling back the thin sheets. The port wing gave an agonized groan as a long crack began traveling its length. Kismet saw jet fuel weeping from the underside of the damaged wing and closed his eyes, waiting for the inevitable. The explosion that followed however was not what he was expecting.

  “Are you insane?”

  Despite all the fury of gunshots and explosions, that strident exclamation was the harshest noise he had heard since arriving. He turned slowly to find, not surprisingly, the copper-haired woman who had preceded him into the terminal.

  “Did you even think to look behind you?” she continued, her scream of fury like fingernails on a chalkboard. Kismet noted absently that the woman was speaking English, fluently judging by the few words he had heard, but faintly accented.

  Yep, French.

  He countered her ferocious mien with one of calm dispassion. “I checked. It was clear.”

  “You almost incinerated us.”

  Kismet understood her distress and tried to be sympathetic. To a non-combatant, the plume of fire erupting from the launch tube must have seemed quite threatening. But he had checked before triggering the device. Moreover, his decision to angle the shot into the tarmac meant that most of the rocket’s exhaust had been directed upward, over the head of anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the backfire zone.

  Outside, the last fragments of debris from the suicide bomb vehicle clattered to the ground. The plane now bore significant scars from the encounter, but could conceivably fly again with extensive repair. Aside from the sole occupant of the vehicle, there appeared to be no casualties directly resulting from the terrorist act.

  Beyond the battered aircraft, the tide of the ongoing gun battle had shifted once again. The attacking force, anticipating only success, had suffered a morale shattering defeat. Their return fire trickled to nothing as they abandoned their positions and retreated toward the city. As Kismet gazed across the tarmac, he saw a squad of olive drab military vehicles charge across the open expanse in pursuit.

  The red-haired woman remained in front of him, seething with misplaced anger, but said nothing more. Kismet blinked at her, then attempted a compromise. “I’m sorry I frightened you, but you weren’t really in any danger. Not from this at least.” He proffered the spent missile tube like an olive branch.

  The woman made a guttural noise that might have been a curse then thrust her hands at his face before spinning on her heel and stalking away.

  He lowered the missile launcher, shaking his head in disbelief, and pitched his voice so that there would be no mistaking his ire. “You’re welcome.”

  Two

  As the battle shifted away from the airport, those inside the terminal building began to emerge from their defensive cocoons. Many of the non-combatants, desperately needing something to do in order to restore their dignity following the terrifying incident, raced to assist Kismet in the effort of lifting the fallen section of wall or began administering first aid to the dozen or more victims of shrapnel injuries.

  Only moments after the confrontation with the woman whose hair color evidently matched her temperament, Kismet once again found himself under fire for having saved the day.

  “Who the hell fired that AT-4?”

  The voice belonged to a man, but was no less strident. Kismet straightened from his labors, turning to face a man wearing desert-pattern fatigues with a brown oak leaf sewn into the collar. He checked the nametape over the man’s right breast pocket before answering. “I did, Major Harp.”

  The officer gaped at him in disbelief, momentarily losing his voice. It was evident from his manner that the man had expected to find one of the soldiers under his command responsible for what must have seemed like a reckless act. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Nick Kismet.” He extended his hand ingenuously.

  “A goddamned civilian?”

  Kismet lowered his hand with a sigh. “I guess so.”

  “I don’t know who you think you are, but this is not some playground where you can come live out your Rambo fantasies.” Kismet got the impression that Harp had used this speech before, practicing and refining his imprecations for maximum effect. The rant continued unchecked. “This is a goddamned war zone, mister. You civilians are to keep your goddamned heads down. I will not have my soldiers put in harm’s way because you people want snapshots for your fucking scrapbooks and war stories to impress women at cocktail parties…”

  “Major!”

  The torrent of rage and blasphemy instantly evaporated with that single, sharply spoken recognition of rank. Harp stiffened to attention, his eyes no longer fixed on Kismet, as the person who had called out stepped into view. Like the major, this man also wore a khaki camouflage battle dress uniform with an oak leaf on
his collar, but his insignia was black: a lieutenant colonel.

  The newcomer scrutinized Kismet, then turned to his subordinate. “At ease, major.”

  Harp relaxed from the disciplined posture; it was evident that his fire had gone out. The colonel turned back to Kismet. “You’ll have to forgive Major Harp. He doesn’t understand that any man who has earned the Silver Star deserves a little respect even if he no longer wears the uniform.”

  Harp’s eyes widened at the revelation and a flush of embarrassment crept over his sand-abraded cheeks, but he kept his silence.

  Kismet raised an eyebrow. “Not very many people know about that.”

  “Well, I do.” The lieutenant colonel took his hand and began pumping it vigorously. “Jon Buttrick, Mr. Kismet. A pleasure to meet you. And from what I’ve heard, we all owe you a debt of gratitude. If that car had gotten any closer, we’d be cleaning this terminal up with a bulldozer.”

  Kismet risked a satisfied grin. “Frankly, colonel—”

  ”Call me Jon, Nick.”

  “Jon. Frankly, I’m glad someone appreciates that I knew what I was doing.”

  The officer chuckled. “I’m sure they’ll all figure it out once they hear about it on CNN.” He nodded to a gathering knot of reporters who circled like vultures, waiting for an opportunity to move in and tear him apart with their questions.

  “Monsieur Kismet.” The small dark-haired woman who had initially met him upon his arrival darted in front of Buttrick. “You’ll be late for your meeting.”

  “My meeting,” Kismet echoed, loud enough for all the journalists to hear. He could almost sense their panic as they saw him maneuver for an escape. “Thank you again for your kind words, colonel.”

  The other man nodded with a knowing smile, allowing the woman to guide Kismet away from the swarm. “Hey, Nick. Listen, if you want to blow up some more stuff, do me a favor and re-up.”

  Kismet ignored the chuckling officer and focused intently on the woman’s shoulders. She hastened directly to the spot where Kismet had left his bags, the place where he had pushed her down and shielded her with his own body. He didn’t even know her name. “Mademoiselle, I don’t believe we’ve been—”