by Sean Ellis
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.
Fourteen
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!”
***
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.