The Shroud of Heaven

by Sean Ellis

  The desert crossing was no easy matter. Their destination lay far to the south, in the empty reaches of the Arabian desert. Saeed had never been there, but knew the longitude and latitude of the place well enough to plot the course on a map. Out here in the wilderness however, maps had little value. Every few kilometers, it was necessary to stop and check their heading against a compass reading, but even at that, they might be off by a few crucial degrees, which over the course of an all-night journey might translate into a navigational disaster.

  To make matters worse, they had to steer an elaborate zig-zagging course in order to avoid what Saeed could only assume to be the probable reach of coalition patrols. As they cruised along, without the benefit of headlights, each man knew that at any moment they might be strafed by an Apache gun ship or obliterated by a TOW missile. Farid’s militants were philosophical. Inshallah—God willing—we will survive. Saeed could not share their ambivalence toward danger and was forced to put his faith in his own uncertain skills.

  Whether by the grace of Allah, or his own abilities, Saeed led them true. As the sun began creeping over the horizon, they arrived at a rocky plateau, which rose from the sand like an island. Leaving behind the vehicles, they commenced a three-kilometer trek to a fissure that split the sandstone formation like a canyon. Yet, in spite of having survived the gauntlet, and the nearness of their destination, Saeed’s dread was multiplying like a virus; it was as if the desert was eating him alive.

  He would feel better once Nick Kismet was dead.

  “What now, brother?” inquired Farid, gazing over the lip into the chasm.

  “There should be an opening in the wall. It is quite large, but impossible to see from the air.”

  Farid squinted into the shadows. Through their sun-blasted eyes, it was difficult to differentiate anything in the darkness below. “I think I see it. But we have no rope.”

  “This entrance was accessible only by helicopter,” Saeed volunteered.

  His brother threw him a contemptuous glance. “We also have no helicopter. “ He began unwinding his kefiya, the traditional head covering which he wore like a turban for added protection from the scorching sun. His confederates, as if telepathically linked, did the same, and when knotted together, the woven scarves formed a cord about eight meters long.

  Saeed regarded the improvised rope dubiously. “Will that hold a man’s weight?”

  “Will it hold? Is it long enough?” Farid shrugged. “Inshallah, my brother.”

  One end was tied around the stock of an AK-47, which was in turn braced by two of the now bareheaded desert fighters. Farid led the way, easing his wiry form over the edge to begin his descent. In a matter of seconds, he was low enough to swing inside a barely visible recess. One by one, the militants followed suit, until only Saeed and the two men holding the belay were left. One of them addressed him with barely veiled scorn. “You must go also.”

  Saeed blinked. “I am unarmed.”

  “Then keep your head down if there is shooting,” laughed the other man.

  Resignedly, Saeed dropped to a prone position and lowered himself into the fissure. It was pleasantly cool in the shadows, but this gave him little comfort. He felt his adrenaline spike as his feet lost contact with the solid surface and his full weight depended from the tenuous grip of his hands on the equally uncertain rope of head cloths. He started involuntarily as a hand gripped his belt, but it was only Farid, pulling him onto the ledge where he and the others stood.

  Saeed blinked rapidly to adjust his vision to the new environment. The fissure in the otherwise solid wall was immense, spreading from the relatively small corner where they stood to a maximum height of twenty meters. It was indeed large enough to fly a helicopter through, if the pilot of that aircraft was either very skilled or completely insane.

  As the sunspots gradually faded from his vision, he was able to more clearly distinguish what lay on the other side of the opening. The Mi-25, its rotor blades looking like an enormous asterisk, sat patiently on the floor of the enormous cavern. “Another long drop, brother. And we have no more kefiyas.”

  Farid sneered at him, then leaned out into the fissure, gave a short whistle and caught the Kalashnikov rifle as it fell through the air. “Now we do.”

  Saeed’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Now how will we get out of here? This is reckless, Farid.”

  “Reckless? This was your plan, brother.” Farid chuckled at his sibling’s obvious anxiety. “It is time for you to show some faith. You may go first.”

  Another belay was quickly established, two more men culled from their fighting force in order to secure the line. Saeed rode the wave of his rising ire as he dropped to his hands and knees and started down into the cave.

  Suddenly, from deep within rock, there came the unmistakable thump of an explosion, and in that instant the cloth rope slipped through his fingers.

  ***

  Kismet looked frantically around the laboratory, searching for anything that might postpone or commute the unexpected death sentence. In the space of only a few minutes, it had grown as hot as a sauna in the metal enclosure. Everything in the lab seemed to be made of stainless steel and as such was conducting the heat as effectively as a griddle on a stovetop. Heat radiated from every surface until the air itself roiled like a liquid.

  Hussein and Marie seemed to be dancing in place, shifting rapidly from one foot to the other as the floor seared right through the soles of their shoes. Kismet realized mordantly that he was also hopping back and forth, but it wasn’t enough. It felt as if his boots were going to burst into flame. Then he spied something that would offer at least a few moments of respite. “This way!”

  He knocked over the rack of specimen cages so that it was spread out like mattress frame. Because the cages were also metal, it would only be a matter of time before they also grew red hot, but the flow of air under the wire mesh would give them a few minutes of relief. Marie followed Hussein onto the makeshift platform. “Nick, what’s happening?”

  “Some kind of self-destruct.” He wiped a hand across his forehead, flinging away beads of sweat which landed on the floor and evaporated with a hiss. “It must have been activated when he closed the door.”

  “When who closed the door? Pierre?”

  “It must have been an accident,” he lied, none too convincingly. It wasn’t an accident. Why, Pierre?

  No time to worry about that.

  In the back of the lab, several chemical containers had been jolted from their shelves by the impact of the door slamming shut. The respective contents of those jars and bottles were now beginning to smolder on the floor, evaporating or burning outright, and releasing an acrid miasma that made the superheated air even more difficult to breath. Kismet’s eyes stung as he stared at the chaos, looking for inspiration.

  “Stay here. I’ve got an idea.” He jumped back onto the floor and ran into the heart of the chemical cloud. His boot soles left black footprints on the metal floor as the rubber began liquefying on contact, and when he tried to stop in front of the storage cabinets, it was like hitting an oil slick. His feet shot out from under him and he hit the floor on his tailbone.

  Everything he touched seemed to be on fire, burning right through the fabric of his jeans and scorching his hands when he tried to get back to his feet. He gritted his teeth against the pain and struggled erect, trying to focus his attention on the labels of the remaining bottles.

  For a moment, he was suffused with hope. There were several substances which could be combined to form highly reactive or explosive compounds. He grabbed a glass jug of iodine and another of clear ammonia, and hastened back to the cage. He spent only a few seconds there, just long enough to see that Hussein, already compromised from his scorpion sting, was now on the verge of passing out, while Marie could only watch in disbelief. Then he was moving again, running for the door. That was when his enthusiasm wilted.

  His plan had been to blow the door with an explosive chemical cocktail, but he
now saw the futility of that scheme. The door was about thirty centimeters thick—twelve inches of metal. The force required to blast through it, even if it were possible, would almost certainly kill anyone inside the lab. He jogged in place in front of the solid barrier, looking for a better answer. That was when he saw her.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Although her copper-colored hair was concealed by a black watch cap, he had no difficulty recognizing the woman who had called herself Dr. Rebecca Gault, framed in the glass viewport. As shocked as he was by her presence, he was not one bit surprised by her attire. She wore black combat fatigues and looked like she belonged on a SWAT team. After his call to the International Red Cross, he had justly assumed her to be some kind of intelligence operative, probably with the DGSE, one of the world’s most ruthless espionage agencies, but he could not have imagined that her mission would coincide with his own. Then again, he would not in his wildest dreams have believed that Pierre Chiron would trap him inside a gigantic pizza oven.

  As he watched, Rebecca activated the tram from the control board, and then sprinted to catch the car as it accelerated from the complex. She was pulled aboard by her comrades, and at that instant, Kismet caught a final glimpse of his former mentor, sitting sphinx-like on the flatbed.

  He realized painfully that he had stopped moving his feet, and that his boot soles were nearly gone. He rocked back onto his heels, where there was a little more insulation remaining, and tore his attention away from the now empty window. The interval had brought him no closer to a solution. If he couldn’t go through the door, what did that leave?

  The walls? The floor?

  The door might have been a foot thick, but the floor almost certainly was not. The fact that the stainless steel had grown so warm, so quickly suggested that it was relatively thin, with some kind of burner unit underneath. It was a slim hope, but if nothing else, it was something to do in the last remaining seconds of his life.

  He set the jugs on the floor and removed the stopper from each so that the expansion of the contents would not cause them to burst. Nevertheless, it was like putting a kettle of water on a stove. Within seconds, a stinging vapor cloud began to boil off the ammonia. Kismet was too busy to notice.

  Holding his kukri in a two-handed grip, he chopped down at a section of the floor near the corner where the door met the wall. The impact rang through the steel blade and vibrated in his hands, but there was a dimple in the floor at the point of contact. He changed his grip and tried a different technique, stabbing downward with all his weight behind the blow. The tip of the kukri pierced the sheet steel to a depth of nearly three centimeters.

  Yes!

  He worked the blade back and forth. While the metal was nowhere near molten, it seemed softer somehow, almost brittle. He twisted the knife and forced it deeper until it abruptly peeled back like a piece of tin foil.

  A blinding white light burst through the hole and Kismet drew back involuntarily, He had punched through right on top of a blazing strip of magnesium. But the initial shock of the revelation was quickly swept away by the deeper implication of what he had discovered: there was a hollow space under the floor.

  He shoved the bottle of ammonia into the void, then quickly decanted the iodine into it. The jug overflowed, spilling the remainder of the iodine down the outside of the glass where it either dripped down into the fire or sizzled away to nothing on the floor, leaving behind a rust-colored residue. As soon as the bottle was empty, he sprinted back toward his companions.

  “Get down!”

  They stared at him in disbelief. Was he actually suggesting that they trade their temporary island for the infernal touch of the steel floor? He didn’t pause to explain, but leaped onto the cages and swept them off, one in each arm.

  To yield the maximum explosive energy, iodine crystals, distilled from the liquid solution of which the element composes only about four percent, would need to steep in pure ammonia for a full day, yielding a brown sludge known as NI-3—nitrogen tri-iodine—one of the most volatile substances known to man. As long as it remained moist, buffered by the liquid ammonia, it would be relatively safe, but once the crystals dried out, any sort of impact would trigger a tremendous blast. Kismet did not have the time to harvest the crystals or slow brew the NI-3, but he was gambling on the extreme temperatures within the laboratory to expedite the process. If he was right, the liquid would boil away within a few seconds, and when the heat cracked the glass jug, with a little bit of luck, it would blow a hole in the corner big enough for them to escape.

  If he was wrong….

  The next thing he remembered was laying on the scorching floor, struggling to draw a breath. His ears were ringing and he felt as though he had just been hit by a truck. The imperative need to get away from the heat stimulated him to action before he could fully grasp what had happened, but it took only a glance to see that a dramatic change had occurred in the lab. Everything not bolted down had been blasted to the rear of the enclosure and every piece of glass that had survived the thunderous closing of the door had been pulverized. More importantly though, a section of the floor and lower wall had bulged outward, opening a narrow crack to the outside.

  His companions were also just beginning to recover from the concussion, unconsciously writhing on the burning hot surface. Kismet pulled them up, and without waiting for their full cooperation, began dragging them toward the door. Marie regained her senses first, and upon realizing that escape was actually possible, lent herself to the effort of pulling the dazed Hussein across the lab. It was a ten second journey through hell.

  Stripes of red metal, where the steel was closest to the magnesium fires, outlined the walls and floor like the ribs of some terrifying dragon, viewed from within its belly. The heat was staggering, sucking their will and vital energy, and turning the very air they breathed into a poisonous wind that seared their lungs, but somehow, they made it.

  “You first,” croaked Kismet.

  Marie looked as though she might demur or protest that Hussein should be the first out, but the logic of his request was unassailable. As the smallest member of the trio, she was guaranteed salvation in a situation where every second mattered. She clenched her teeth against the expected agony of contact with the edge of the doorframe and the portion of the wall that had bulged outward, and then plunged through the gap. A moment later, her blistered hand appeared beseechingly in the opening. “Send him through!”

  Kismet bustled the still unresponsive Iraqi toward the hole, but it was plainly obvious that he was not going to pass through as easily. He gripped Hussein’s shirt and started shoving. It was plainly obvious that Marie was exerting all her strength from the other side, but Hussein seemed to be wedged in place. He redoubled his efforts, shouting at the top of his lungs for Marie to pull.

  Hussein’s shirt, and the flesh beneath it, tore free of the metal spur that had held him in place. He emitted a harsh cry, suddenly coming alert, and then was gone, pulled through the hole in Marie’s grasp. Kismet didn’t wait for encouragement. He plunged head first into the opening, his arms extended above his head like a diver, and pushed off with his feet. By wriggling his shoulders, he was able to squirm through the narrow gap, but it was nevertheless like escaping from a fiery womb. The torn metal sheets and the crumbled rock of the cavern wall formed a rough circle that tore through his shirt and dug long furrows into his flesh, but through it all, he felt Marie’s grip, stronger than he would have imagined, around his wrists, drawing him relentlessly on. As soon as his upper body was clear, he pulled free of her grip and scrambled clear of the hole.

  It was like diving into a mountain lake. He hungrily gasped fresh air into his tortured lungs, and as he lay on his back, all he could do was savor the touch of cool stone against his skin. Marie huddled at his side. Her hands were bright red and blistered from second degree contact burns, and her face was similarly suffused with scarlet beneath a cap of lank, distressed hair, but she appeared otherwise intact. Hussei
n, though on his feet, did not appear to be doing quite that well. His gaze was unfocused as he meandered away from the blasted laboratory. Kismet tried to call to him but his starved lungs refused to yield the breath necessary to utter a sound. Looking into Marie’s grateful eyes, he decided that it could probably wait a few minutes. After the hellish struggle to survive the laboratory, his relief at being alive overwhelmed even his desire to comprehend Chiron’s betrayal. That too could wait, at least until they were done rejoicing.

  Suddenly a noise like a string of firecrackers bursting in rapid succession rattled between the walls, and he knew the celebration was over. Marie gasped in alarm and instinctively pressed close to the wall of the cavern, intuiting that the sound was indeed gunfire. The young Iraqi stood frozen in place out in the open, neither looking nor moving in any purposeful way, but Kismet noticed that he had his hands pressed to his abdomen in a vain attempt to staunch a deluge of crimson. Then another burst erupted from the unseen sniper’s weapon, and nearly tore Hussein Hamallah in half.

  Thirteen

  For a fleeting instant, he thought that Rebecca must have left some of her force behind to ensure that no one would escape to tell the tale of Chiron’s vile betrayal. But the throaty roar of an AK-47 was an unmistakable sound, and he figured Rebecca and her cohorts for something with a little more finesse. Who did that leave?

  The shots had come from the direction of the tunnel leading to the cavern where the helicopter was hangared, but from his vantage, the mouth of that passage was eclipsed by a protruding section of cavern wall. If he could not see the shooter, then it stood to reason…

  “Stay here,” he whispered. “I’ll try to draw their fire.”