Without celebrating his narrow escape, without even glancing back at the falling debris, Reg sped east to catch up to the others. Of course, he was glad to have survived the encounter. But as he looked north and saw the squadron of alien attackers becoming visible in the distance, he realized that his being alive was probably only a very temporary state of affairs. Only a moment after struggling to save himself, he found himself hoping the aliens would chase him out into the desert and hunt him down.
But that didn’t happen. The scarab planes resisted the temptation to snack on Reg’s small band of refugee pilots and instead continued south toward the feast awaiting them at Khamis Moushalt. As he headed deeper into the desert, Reg switched over to the private frequency and heard the tower operator desperately calling out the alert. “Incoming! Incoming!”
2
RETREAT
Leaving the Red Sea behind them, Reg and his motley crew of survivors headed out across one of the most inhospitable environments on the face of the Earth, the great sand desert of the Arabian peninsula. Stretching out to the horizon in all directions, it was an ocean of gently undulating sand dunes, some of them a hundred meters tall. Shaped by the wind, they looked like the cresting waves of the ocean that had once covered the land. The Arabs called it Rub al-Khali, the Empty Quarter. It was a place the fiercest Bedouin tribes feared to cross, even in the ubiquitous Toyota trucks that had long since replaced camels. The international borders running through the area had never been precisely defined. No war had ever been fought for its control. It was one of the only places on the face of the planet that no one wanted.
The shouting, arguing and whimpering that had filled the radio waves subsided as the pilots headed deeper into this awesome and pitiless landscape. Fuel levels were running dangerously low and the warning systems aboard the planes began to sound. It appeared as though they had eluded one enemy only to run headlong into the arms of another. Instead of a swift, explosive death from an alien energy pulse, they now faced a slow, painful one in the desert. Their only hope was to find one of the tiny oases that dotted the desert. But the Empty Quarter was roughly the size of Texas, which meant they were looking for a needle in a field full of haystacks.
Reg had visited a few oases. They were not grass green patches of land full of swaying palm trees that most Westerners imagined. Instead, they typically consisted of a few tiny buildings and an oil derrick or two. A few of the places were marked on Reg’s onboard maps, but without satellite navigation systems the maps were useless. The Empty Quarter offered no permanent landmarks by which to navigate. It was a place that gave up no secrets.
One by one, the jets began to run out of fuel and fall from the sky. The first to go down was a Jordanian. Before he ditched his plane, the terrified pilot begged his countrymen to remember the coordinates and send rescuers for him as soon as they could. They promised they would, but everyone knew it wasn’t going to happen. Moving deeper into the desert with each passing minute, the pilots scoured the landscape with their eyes and called for help over their radios. Four more pilots were lost to lack of fuel, and Reg began to feel the panic level rising in his chest like the waterline in a sinking ship. The red warning light on his own fuel meter began to blink. It was only a matter of time.
Just when all seemed lost, a Libyan pilot spotted what looked like a column of smoke rising on the horizon.
“That looks like an oil fire,” said Tye.
As the group turned and raced in that direction, one of the Israelis, a man with a froggy voice, quoted from the Bible. “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud.” Then he asked, “Are you a believer, Major Cummins?”
“Let’s just say I believe we’re going to need all the help we can get,” Reg replied.
The source of the smoke came into view. A crashed tanker plane was burning out of control. The jet fuel it had been carrying had spilled over a wide area and was belching a mushroom cloud of black smoke high into the hot, motionless air.
It took Reg a moment to recognize the place, though he’d flown past it with his students more than once. It was an oil-drilling station set atop a barren, rocky plateau. It was surrounded by a ring of stony hills that kept the ever-shifting dunes from burying the plateau in sand. Since Reg had seen it last, the site had been transformed. It was now a small military airfield. Over a hundred Saudi combat planes were parked alongside a freshly repaved landing strip.
“I don’t believe my eyes!” Tye shouted. “We’re saved.”
“It must be a mirage,” Sutton said. “What is this place?”
“My guess is that this must have been a designated fallback position for the Saudi military,” Reg said. Then he added, “Would’ve been nice of them to let us know about it.”
“Why haven’t the bastards answered our distress calls?” Thomson fumed.
“I suggest we go down there and ask them.”
None of the pilots bothered to request permission to land. Jostling for position, they lined up nearly nose cone to tail fin and descended toward the runway at the same time.
When Colonel Thomson saw the situation he was in, he shrieked and rolled out of formation. His fuel gauge had long since run to zero, but he decided it would be safer to risk another loop around. He hadn’t flown a fighter jet for more than a decade and was more than a little rusty.
Earlier that morning, before dawn, he’d been in his office on the island of Cyprus, packing his personal effects neatly into cardboard boxes. The entire base was closing and he was preparing to be transferred to an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. Then the surprising news arrived that the colonel would instead be flying a Tornado jet fighter to Kuwait. He was given ten minutes to report He poured himself a capful of whiskey and looked around the office, deciding what to bring. The first thing he picked up was the photograph of him standing between a pair of much taller men, President Whitmore and the Italian prime minister, but he quickly tossed it aside. He ended up taking just three things: a recent picture of his wife and three daughters, which he creased and slipped into his wallet; a red, dog-eared copy of The Traveler’s Guide to Handy Phrases in Arabic; and a pearl-handled revolver his father had given him years before. He loaded the pistol, tucked it inside his jacket and left without closing the door behind him.
“Thomson, you were on a good approach,” Reg said. “Why’d you pull up?”
“A man needs room to land a plane!” the colonel yelled back. “I’m not a damned stunt pilot!”
Resisting the urge to ask the colonel exactly what kind of pilot he was, Reg coached him into a passable landing. Tye and Sutton, on the other hand, handled themselves like seasoned veterans, landing their Tornadoes almost flawlessly.
When he lined up for his own landing, however, Reg’s luck finally deserted him. His Hawk sputtered and flamed out as the final dregs of jet fuel were consumed. Quickly sizing up the situation, he saw there was no way to make an unpowered landing. Too many jets were still on approach and he was losing altitude fast. But there was an even more pressing problem. He was heading toward a row of gleaming Saudi F-15 Eagles parked near the foot of the runway and was going to demolish them if he didn’t do something. Acting on instinct, Reg jammed his yoke all the way forward, tilting the nose of his plane straight down. The Hawk plummeted toward the ground like a heavy stone. A moment before he crashed into the plateau wall, he hugged his arms and legs close to his body and activated the explosive bolts of his ejection seat.
The clear canopy ripped away, and Reg hurtled out of the doomed jet fighter, flying parallel to the ground at a sickening rate of speed. The silk canopy attached to his harness acted as much as a drag chute as it did a parachute. As he shot through the air like a human cannonball, Reg caught a momentary glimpse of the dumbfounded expression on the face of a Syrian pilot who was flying in the same direction.
As his Hawk piled into the ground and exploded in a huge fire ball, Reg drifted down to the tarmac and hit the ground running, following the jets
down the runway. Skidding to a halt, he hustled to flatten his chute and pull it to one side, where it wouldn’t hamper the few planes left to land.
He marched down the runway until he noticed three British pilots staring at him in disbelief. By the time he walked up to where they were standing in the shade of a freshly parked Tornado, he was drenched in sweat. It was well over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the Brits was a gangly red-haired lad who was shaking his head in stupefied amazement. Reg didn’t need to see a name tag to guess who he was.
“Better close your mouth there, Airman Tye. It’s wicked dry out here in the desert.”
*
Things in the camp did not get off to an auspicious beginning. The Saudis insisted on keeping the new arrivals away from their planes and tents. The contingent of international pilots was kept segregated on one side of the plateau, well away from the landing strip. The armed soldiers the Saudis posted along their border refused to answer questions, even from pilots who came from countries allied with Saudi Arabia.
To make matters worse, the pilots quickly balkanized themselves into national groupings and kept well away from their traditional enemies. Everyone in the international part of the camp, it seemed, was angry with the Saudis and deeply suspicious of one another. Even Reg Cummins was having trouble cracking the code of silence among the Saudi guards and wringing information from them. As he was trying, screaming erupted from the Israeli group.
The Israelis had been the first to isolate themselves from the others, most of whom were Arabs. There had been a great deal of shouting in Hebrew since they had withdrawn to the shade of their planes, but it seemed directed toward one of their own. After a shrill, piercing cry rang through the air, the man who seemed to be causing most of the disturbance broke free of the group and came sprinting wildly across the dusty earth toward Reg. Both Sutton and Tye, lounging in the nearby shade, stood to meet the challenge but Reg motioned them back.
“What are you?” demanded the crazed Israeli. He had a haunted, terrified look on his face and was dripping with sweat.
“Easy there, pilot,” Reg said. “I’m an English officer. We’re allies.”
“English? What is English?” he screamed. Two of his countrymen ran up behind the man, whose name tag identified him as greenberg and took hold of his arms, but he continued to rage. “That means nothing now. I want to know if you are human? Are you a human or one of them?”
“Human,” Reg assured him, “one hundred percent human.”
The answer seemed to calm the man down, but only for a moment. With the strength that only the demented possess, he threw both the men restraining him to the ground and ran to the next group, the Iranians.
“What are you? Are you human?” he screamed at a muscular pilot who had stripped to the waist. The man didn’t answer, but scoffed and turned away. When Greenberg took another step toward him, the Iranian threw a sudden, vicious elbow to the middle of the Israeli’s face. A fountain of bright red blood flew through the air as Greenberg crumpled to the ground. One of the men chasing Greenberg started a shoving match with the Iranian and soon the entire Israeli contingent was converging on the site.
Reg groaned a little. “Let the games begin,” he said, half in disgust before he, too, started hurrying toward the trouble. Before he got there, however, an unlikely figure appeared in the center of the impending storm, shouting for order in atrocious Arabic. The man waved a well-thumbed red phrase book in the air with imperious authority. Reg blinked. It was Thomson.
The gathering mob, which had been on the verge of embarking on a full-fledged rumble, came to a dead stop, startled by the force of the colonel’s command, even though none of them had understood a word he had said. Thomson did not cut an impressive figure. He was an average-looking man, well under six feet tall, and a bit thick around the middle. He sported a pencil-thin mustache and, like many balding men, let what little hair was still left to him grow long enough to comb over the top of his shiny scalp. Curiously, despite being overweight, he hardly perspired at all.
“Now then,” the little colonel roared, “what’s all this nonsense about?” When the two sides recovered from their shock and again began to shout at one another, Thomson leapt between them, drawing their anger to himself like a lightning rod and diffusing it. As the dispute raged on, he continued to consult his phrase book and shout appropriate phrases over the noise of the assembly. In this manner, he staved off an all-out brawl long enough for Greenberg to be led away. The Israeli was covered in his own blood, and his nose was obviously broken.
Reg was feeling somewhat broken himself. He thought of Jerusalem, obliterated, and sympathized with the jabbering Israeli. After everything that had happened—the city leveled by an unfightable foe, the destruction of his home base, the loss of those pilots over the desert—Reg could understand why madness might be an attractive alternative. Giving in to fear and paranoia seemed, under the circumstances, perfectly natural. It relieved a man like Greenberg of the responsibility of figuring out what to do next.
Even as tensions between the Iranians and Israelis began to dissipate, Thomson continued to quote the scripture he found in his copy of The Traveler’s Guide to Handy Phrases in Arabic. It wasn’t clear whether he realized what an ass he was making of himself.
Finally, one of the Iranians who was laughing at him filled him in on a little secret. “Colonel, perhaps you are unaware of the fact that none of us standing here are speakers of Arabic, not native speakers at any rate.”
Thomson, befuddled, looked at the man and then at his trusty handbook. “How do you mean?”
The Iranian laughed again. “We speak Farsi, and the Jews speak Hebrew. Actually, I have picked up a bit of Arabic, enough to know your accent is absolutely abominable!”
With tensions temporarily abated, the two groups returned to their respective enclaves. Reg, braving the heat, walked to the edge of the plateau and looked over the lip of the crumbling sandstone abutment. Below him, he watched a handful of Saudi soldiers trying to extinguish the still-burning remains of his Hawk and the crashed fuel tanker. The soldiers, wearing traditional red headdresses, and armed only with shovels and small fire extinguishers, did the best they could to suppress the flames. Great clouds of black smoke continued to billow into the windless blue sky. The smoke announced their location for many miles around, a beacon to wandering pilots. Indeed, more planes were arriving all the time, most of them straggling in from the north. But if human pilots could use the fires to find the camp, the aliens surely could as well.
When he rejoined the other pilots, Reg found a large number of them haranguing the guards. They were demanding to know the news from their home countries, if the aliens had landed, and whether or not their planes would be refueled. The more the guards refused to speak, the angrier and more insistent the pilots became. Reg noticed a couple of the Saudis slip away from the confrontation and hurry into the tent town they had erected among the planes on the far side of the runway. In addition to the tactical fighters, there were a number of transport and cargo planes. There was a fuel tanker identical to the one that had crashed and a score of private luxury jets, undoubtedly the property of wealthy families. Reg wasn’t surprised to see the civilian aircraft because he was familiar with the way rich Saudis, especially members of the royal family, considered the armed forces almost as personal bodyguards.
Soon the two men who had slipped away returned, leading a small army of machine-gun-toting reinforcements. They fanned out and crouched along the runway as if they expected a battle.
Their commanding officer was a huge, powerfully built captain with severe eyes and a hooked nose. Like the other Saudis, he wore a keffiyeh, the checkered red-and-white headcloth held in place by black cords. Despite the oppressive heat, he was dressed in an olive drab uniform made of wool. All business, he marched toward the refugee pilots, shouting orders in Arabic. When he noticed the Israelis, however, he stopped in his tracks. For a moment, he seemed to be at a loss. Then he
cleared his throat and made an announcement in English.
“Jews are not allowed in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is Islamic holy land.”
Pilots from several nations were shouting, trying to get his attention, but all fell silent when the senior officer among the Israelis, who happened to be a woman, bulled her way to the front of the crowd. When he saw her, the Saudi captain backpedaled. He had just gotten used to the idea of dealing with Jews, but now a female Jewish fighter pilot who shared his rank? This seemed as impossible to comprehend to the Saudi as the sudden arrival of aliens from outer space.
“You don’t want us here? We’d be happy to leave. Just give us enough fuel to get the hell out of here.”
In rough English, the Saudi announced that the airfield was in a state of heightened alert until the fires burned themselves out. The pilots were to remain with their planes. Water and food would be brought to them, along with shovels so they could dig their own latrines. They were not, under any circumstances, allowed to leave the area that had been set aside for them until the commander of the base gave the go-ahead.
“And when might that be?” inquired Thomson.
“Commander Faisal is still studying the situation,” came the reply.
“Well, what about an update on what’s going on out there?” Everyone understood Thomson’s vague wave to the north to mean the entire world.
“You must be patient, Colonel,” said the hook-nosed man. With a last, hate-filled glare at the Israeli woman, he turned on his heels and walked away.
“Arrogant son of a bitch, isn’t he?” asked Sutton. He was about Reg’s age, somewhere in his mid-thirties, with a flattop haircut and a sharp cast to his features. He shook his head in disgust. “I don’t know who’s worse,” he continued, “the aliens or these self-righteous bastards.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 54