by Paul Watkins
When Gabriel took off his canvas backpack to rest, he saw an arch of sweat darkening the cloth between the straps. He had been sweating so much that he’d lost track of where his skin ended and his soggy clothes began. When the clothes dried, the salt tie-dyed them with white powder. It had been a hot day, even under the canopy of trees, where the still air filled his lungs with the fragrance of earth and pine needles and the faint sweetness of white birch. In places, the pines grew so thick that nothing but poisonous amanita mushrooms grew between the trees. When he came to the stands of birch, the bony pillars seemed to shift around him.
The only thing Gabriel had now to guide himself with was a compass. There were no paths except the narrow trails of moose and deer, which he followed when he grew too tired to make paths of his own through the face-scratching branches of pine. Every hour, he took out his compass and took a bearing. Then he began walking again. Often there were mountains in the way. He climbed them, feeling the ascent in his calves and his thighs, leaning into the slope so that his face was no more than a couple of feet from the path. His arms went numb from the digging pack straps. When he reached the stony skull of the mountain crest, he would stop, let his pack slip from his shoulders and sit down on it to rest. Blueberries grew among the ripples of the rock and he would pick as many as he could, the pale-blue and the dark-blue, almost black berries disappearing without inspection into his mouth. He would crush them with his tongue and swallow, feeling the sugar jump through his body.
It was dusk before he even realized it was growing dark. The light had faded so gently that he’d barely noticed it. The first stars popped out of the blue. He walked on a while longer, seeing color fade from the trees until he was in a world of black and white and the navy of the sky. He began to stumble on roots. Then he knew it was time to stop.
Gabriel found a patch of soft earth. He walked around the place where he would put his tent, the way a dog circles the ground it chooses for a bed. When his tent was pitched, he cut a two-inch-deep hole into the trunk of a birch tree. As the sap started to run, he folded a piece of birch bark into a tube and set it in the hole to act as a funnel. Then he pulled the lace from one of his boots and tied a blue-and-white-speckled enamel mug to the tree to catch the dripping sap. He touched his finger to the drop-by-drop trickle and brushed the clear liquid across his lips, tasting the sweet pepperiness of the sap. He checked that the mug was secure and crawled inside his tent.
The night brought silence, except for wind moving like a scavenger around the trunks of trees. Inside his tent, he felt the quiet cup itself around him. He switched on his angle-headed flashlight. It had a red filter over the bulb to help him keep his night vision. He rooted in his pack, taking out the plastic-bagged bundle containing his clean clothes, smelling the perfume of detergent from a Laundromat in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he’d washed them a week ago. At the bottom of the pack was a tan canvas holster. From it, Gabriel pulled an old Webley revolver. Its blue-black, hexagonal barrel showed him back the red light of the bulb. There were no bullets in the gun now. He kept those in an airtight plastic tub, which was itself wrapped in plastic. He was careful with the bullets: they were .455 caliber, which was hard to find, and he could not afford to go buying handgun ammunition now. Suspicion would follow him out of the shop. He put the gun away and sniffed the oil on the tips of his fingers. Each time he brought out the gun and looked at it, he felt reminded of how far he was beyond the point of turning back.
The last thing he looked at from his pack was his wallet. It was made of black nylon with a Velcro closing strap. From it, he pulled his American driver’s license and social security card. It was a New Jersey license, with a red band across the top that said Operator. The name on the license was Adam Gabriel. The first name was his, but not the second. He had been given the forged document six weeks before, out in Idaho.
Gabriel switched off the flashlight and lay down in his tent. He looked out through the mosquito-netted opening. A meteor shower cut arcs above the trees. He imagined the night as black paint on the glass vault of the sky, the meteors scratches across it, showing the sunlight beyond. “Get out the way for old man Tucker,” he whispered. Then he stayed silent, as he used to do, but not even his daydreams called back.
One year and six months earlier, Adam Gabriel had bailed out of an F-14 jet fighter at three thousand feet over the Iraqi desert. He had been flying bomber escort from the USS Pendleton.
Gabriel was banking to cover a second run over the city. As he turned, he saw tracer fire like huge pearl necklaces moving slowly through the sky. Parts of the city were burning. He could make out sections of road in the downtown area, where a number of the bombs had fallen. These smooth paths vanished into shadow-filled craters. Rubble lay in giant crumbs across the streets.
He was leveling out of the turn when he heard a slamming noise from somewhere behind him and to the right. It was exactly the same sound that the kitchen door in his parents’ house used to make when someone swung it shut. For a moment, the noise stunned him. Then he waited for the first sign of damage—lights on the instrument panel, or no response from the controls. His mind clattered through the bailout procedure. There had been no missile-tracking alarm. No hurricane blast of air through the cockpit, as he’d been taught to expect when the canopy shattered. No desperate bleep from any of the aircraft sensors. He banked slowly through a second turn. Then the fuel warning light went on.
Gabriel radioed that his plane was hit, but he did not know how badly. Sweat from his upper lip smeared on the helmet microphone. He called into the dark that if his engine began to fail, he would try to land his plane at one of the supply runways in Kuwait. If he could not make it that far, he knew he would have to bail out over Iraqi territory.
He disengaged from the bombers and headed for the nearest runway. Another fighter accompanied him, piloted by a lieutenant named Casper Wright. Flying from the aircraft carrier to their rendezvous with the bombers, Wright’s plane had banked with him, in and out of turns, as if the two machines were joined by invisible wires.
Wright reminded Gabriel to tighten all his straps as hard as he could take it and to prepare his cockpit for bailout. It was a comfort to hear Wright’s voice. Wright was from Tallahassee, Florida. Gabriel could make out the Panhandle twang in his voice. Gabriel’s mind still plodded back and forth along the question of what could have hit him. He had seen no tracer fire. There had been only one slamming noise, not several. He knew what the other pilots would say when they heard he had been brought down. They would say he had lost out to the Golden BB, one stray unaimed bullet wandering through the sky.
All through training and all the way out to the Gulf, Gabriel had worried that he might not behave correctly if something went wrong in the air. He’d been taught the procedures. It was not about that. He was afraid that dread would cloud his mind. But now here he was, the fuel alarm flashing tiny rubies in his eyes, and his thoughts were as clear as they had ever been.
Gabriel played the game of placing odds on his chances of making it home. He wrote them on the notepad that was strapped to his right knee. He played the game to concentrate his thoughts, in case panic reared up and caught him by surprise.
Wright asked him to check the fuel gauge. The reading was lower now. Gabriel realized he would probably never find out what had caused the damage. He tried to remember how much he had been told these planes cost. Gabriel was surprised to feel embarrassed at having been brought down. He had not expected this emotion. Then he wondered if his own negligence had put him in the line of fire.
He was losing altitude now. He looked up and saw the belly of Wright’s jet, set against the navy-blue night sky. A web of stars fanned out around the plane. The yellow-orange exhaust flame was like a comet, chasing and always just about to catch the F-14.
Gabriel told Wright he was going to have to bail out and asked if he knew whether they were over Allied territory yet.
Wright said, “Not yet.” They were near th
e Kuwaiti oil fields, which were just inside Iraqi lines. That area was expected to be a heavy combat zone as soon as the land assault began. Wright was quiet for a minute, his voice replaced by the soft rush of static in Gabriel’s headset. Then Wright said he would radio in the coordinates of the bailout and would make sure a rescue helicopter was deployed immediately. He told Gabriel to lie low and get his distress beacon going as soon as he hit the ground. Gabriel knew all this. He knew what he would do and what Wright would do, because they had all been trained in it until the moves were chiseled into their minds like some kind of genetic coding.
Gabriel’s fuel marker bounced off zero. He could feel the power fail, the smooth rush of the jet becoming choked. Any second now, the engine would die. Then the plane would move into a free fall.
Wright said he would see him real soon.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said. Then he switched off the intercom. He checked his straps again, breathing as slowly as he could in the last few seconds before bailout. He looked down and saw dozens of fires burning in the dark. The flames were thick and yellow-orange, obscured by coal-black smoke. Gabriel knew the wellheads had been blown and the oil was burning out of control. He knew this meant that the Iraqis might have pulled back, leaving the burning wells for the Americans to deal with. The plane shuddered slightly, and then a steady tone from the fuel-tank warning system reached his ears, like the sound of a TV station when the programs are finished for the night. With the first cough of the dying engine’s thunder, Gabriel blew the cockpit canopy. Cool desert night air rushed around him.
The nose of the F-14 dipped. The horizon rushed over Gabriel’s head and out of sight. He closed the visor on his helmet.
He fired the bailout charge. His blood drained from his skull with the roughness of sand and slammed into his feet. The visor shattered as something smashed against it and in the fraction of a second that he could keep his eyes open, Gabriel saw the plane hurtling away from him. The heat of the jet’s engine surrounded his face, stabbing through the broken visor. It felt as if his flesh would melt like wax. Then the heat was gone and only the pain of having been scorched remained on his face. His flameproof Nomex suit and gloves protected the rest of his body. He was upside down and then right side up. Blood zigzagged across his face. He could feel wind chilling the blood across his forehead. He didn’t know how badly he’d been cut.
Gabriel cartwheeled through the air. The chair rockets that had launched him from the plane still hissed. Then the rockets quit and he found himself surrounded by nothing but the sound of rushing wind. Gradually his head stopped spinning. He understood that he was falling sideways.
The chutes popped and jolted him upright. He felt a tug in his neck. Blood plowed into his head. He was blacking out.
Suddenly the ground was very close. Gabriel did not know if he had fainted. The desert filed away beneath him. He could see the ripples of dunes and cracks where the sand had blown away, exposing hard-packed earth. The oil-well fires blazed in the distance.
The chair straps were bands of pain across his shoulders and stomach, digging into his flesh. Dizziness rocked in his skull and he wondered if he had been badly hurt. The cuts sent pain in streaks across his face. His burned flesh felt tight and stretched across his cheekbones.
Gabriel looked out into the dark, hoping to see where his plane had landed. But he saw nothing, and he knew that since the plane had no fuel in it, the jet might not burn, leaving no smoke to trace. It would not leave the enemy anything to follow, either. He had seen no vehicles on his way down, no towns or roads. Just desert. Wright would have called in his position by now. He was grateful for Wright’s company. A daydream sputtered through Gabriel’s head of himself going to visit Wright when they both reached home again. He imagined a house surrounded by palm trees and cypresses draped in Spanish moss. Strange to be thinking this, Gabriel thought, while I’m drifting through space like sad old Major Tom.
The ground climbed up to meet him. The snakes of wind-rippled dunes. He smelled the earth now, the heaviness of it. The chill of the Arabian night against his face.
He wondered if he was going to die. He felt strangely calm about it, as if the outcome had been decided long before and he was only going through the motions.
The earth seemed to rise, gaping like shark jaws.
The jolt of landing slammed Gabriel facedown. He felt grit in his eyes and his mouth and up his nose and then he felt nothing. He did not even have the time to wonder if he were dead.
Dawn woke him. The first thing he saw was grains of sand a few inches from his face. The top of the jet seat had prevented him from being plunged into the dune, where he would have suffocated. He crunched sand between his teeth when he bit down. Some of the grains were in his eyes and he wiped them away with his aching fingers. They ached as if he had arthritis. He was aching all over. Each joint seemed to have been prised apart and popped back together. He could feel bruises where the straps had held him in place, down around his shoulders and across his waist. They would be the kinds of purple ones that take months to go away. When Gabriel twisted his head to one side, nerves in his spine cracked in sparks of pain across his shoulders and down into his arms.
He released his straps and crawled slowly out from under the chair. The hugeness of the desert sky hung over him. He had never seen anything like it. Stars reached from one end of the horizon to the other. All his life until now there had been a jagged line of trees to mark the distance of his sight. He knew that soon the sun would rear up from the dunes and scorch this place. Gabriel took a deep breath and coughed at the dead-fireworks stench that came from the underside of his seat. The bailout rockets had blackened his boots and melted the rubber soles. From where he stood, he could not see the oil fires, but their smoke massed in the sky like the iron-gray clouds of an approaching hurricane. Through breaks in the darkness, Gabriel could see the silhouetted outlines of skyscrapers—the blacked-out towers of Kuwait City.
The sun came up angry from the desert. He walked up to the highest point in the dunes and squinted off toward the horizon, turning himself slowly around in the sand, hunting for signs of life. Before him lay what he imagined hell must look like: vicious bolts of flame shot from spigots where the oil wellheads had been. Already the pale sand was a slick creosote black. There was no sky. There was only the smoke. He could smell it, vaguely sweet and sickly. It felt as if drops of the oil were condensing in his lungs.
Gabriel wondered how long he had been unconscious. He worried that the rescue helicopters might have been out looking for him but had given up when they found no distress-beacon signal. As quickly as he could, he set up the distress beacon, the TACBE, which would connect him with any AWAC planes flying over the area. It was a small metal box with a long aerial and a stand to keep the unit upright. There were two settings for the TACBE, one which would make the unit function as a long-range beacon, and another which would put him in touch with any aircraft in the immediate vicinity. He had been told that once he turned it on, he would be in touch with an AWAC within fifteen seconds. He pulled the long-range tab and heard the swishing sound as the unit engaged.
“Hello, AWAC,” he called into the microphone. I am F-15 down, over.” Then he said it again. “I am F-15 down, over. Can you hear me? Over.” He talked into the machine for fifteen minutes and then switched it off. The battery was good for only twenty-four hours, so he decided he would turn it on and off every fifteen minutes. The routine would keep him busy. He worried about the Iraqis homing in on his signal.
Gabriel dug a hole in the sand under his chair and crawled into the space. Every fifteen minutes, he reached his arm out into the skin-prickling sun and turned the beacon’s on/off switch and called into the microphone. “I am F-15 down, over. Can you hear me? Over.”
He heard big guns firing in the distance. Several times, he heard the sound of jets but could not see them. Once he made out the thin profile of a helicopter, appearing and disappearing through the smoke. It wasn’t
close enough to see him. On the morning of the next day, Gabriel saw the red light die on the TACBE’s battery pack.
Loneliness clamped down on him. Gabriel crawled out from under his chair and shielded his eyes from the sun. He knew he’d have to start walking toward Kuwait City, through the oil fields. He set out immediately, knowing that, without food or water, the longer he waited, the weaker he would become. As he walked, he heard a distant rumbling like thunder. First Gabriel thought it was close by and then it seemed to have disappeared altogether. Wind was carrying the sound. As he came closer to the oil fields, he realized it was the sound of the fires, roaring open furnaces incinerating the sky.
The burned rubber on his boots picked up sand until it looked as if the soles were made of the tiny grains. It was harder to walk. Gabriel wound his silk scarf around his mouth and nose. He normally wore it to stop his neck from chafing as he looked constantly from side to side in the cockpit of his plane.
All day he walked toward the fires. They were much farther away than he had thought. Gradually the ground turned black, each grain of sand caught in a sphere of oil. When he looked behind him he could see his own footprints, white like bone and trailing off in a drunken-looking line into the dunes. Scrub brush had become fans of shining black like coral.
Kuwait was vast and silent on the horizon. Gabriel began to feel as if he were the last person left on the planet. It was harder to breathe. He ran his fingers through his hair and the strands were thick with tar. His overalls were as black as the sand. Burning drops of it collected in the corners of his eyes.
The sun went down, bloody through the smoke. Gabriel walked all night, sometimes so close to the fires that he could feel their heat. They glimmered off the low-hanging clouds and by this light he saw old corpses that had been lying there for days. They were sculpture-like now, all features slathered into anonymity by oil.