The Shroud of Heaven

Twelve

Rebecca Gault jumped down from the moving rail car as soon as it entered the laboratory complex, dropped into a tactical crouch and brought her machine pistol to the high ready. Her team imitated her actions and before the tram could bump to a halt, they had formed a defensive perimeter and were scanning for possible targets. The holographic reflex sight on Rebecca’s weapon illuminated the center of Pierre Chiron’s chest with a red dot. There was no one else visible in the spacious cavern. The scientist was seated on a bulky object, covered with a large nylon sack bearing the seal of the United Nations and UNESCO. It looked eerily like a body bag. Without lowering the gun, she rose to her full height and advanced on him.

“Where are they?” she asked in their shared tongue.

Chiron gestured toward Laboratory Two. “I think you’ll be pleased. Two of them are still in their shipping containers. The third was disassembled for research, but all the important parts are there.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh.” The old man winced guiltily, but straightened, assuming a supercilious air. “That’s not your concern. You won’t be bothered. Have your men load this onto the tram.”

She regarded him with barely concealed distaste, but two members of the team hastened forward, following his orders without her verbal direction. There was no question of who was really in charge. The heavy parcel was hefted onto the rail car bed.

“What is that?”

“That also is not your concern.” Chiron gave a sigh, and then softened his tone. “Suffice it to say, I found what I was looking for. Now, let’s finish this business and be away from here.”

Rebecca nodded and secured her weapon. In the corner of her eye, she saw the scientist following her, but made no effort to acknowledge him. Her reaction to the man was not based on any sort of personal dislike. She barely knew him. Instead, she was troubled by the fact that he was there at all, right in the middle of a very delicate and important mission. The situation was further complicated by the fact that he was, nominally, at least, in charge.

The complicity of the French government in sustaining the hegemony of Saddam Hussein was arguably no worse than that of any other Western nation. Even the United States had turned a blind eye to the internal atrocities and human rights abuses of the Baathist dictator in order to cultivate an ally first against the growing Soviet influence in the region, then against the perceived danger posed by Iran. The French government in the mid-1980s had gone a step further by loaning the war-beleaguered nation three nuclear detonators in exchange for future oil leases. Because the deal did not include the plutonium cores necessary to arm the weapons, nor the technology to process that element, it seemed akin to giving a child a gun with not only the bullets but also the firing pin removed. It was perhaps not the wisest thing to do, but certainly posed no imminent threat.

In fact, no peril had arisen from the transaction. Saddam had not produced a nuclear weapon for use against Iran, Israel, or the allied nations during the first Gulf War. With the eyes of the world upon him, the dictator could not openly pursue nuclear refinement technologies. But the weapons now posed a new sort of risk to the French government. If the inspectors from International Atomic Energy Agency found the detonators, it would be scandalously embarrassing to the French government. And now that victory in the war to oust Saddam ensured that every corner of the country would be scoured for anything relating to weapons research, such a discovery seemed inevitable.

But help had come from an unexpected source. An atomic scientist and UN official named Pierre Chiron, who had always been a thorn in the side of the Defense Ministry for his opposition to ongoing testing of France’s nuclear arsenal, had approached his long-time nemeses with a conciliatory offer. He believed he could locate the missing detonators, and with help from a commando team, secure or destroy them. The matter was given over to the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (General Directorate for External Security) who in turn handed the assignment to one of their top field officers: the woman who now called herself Rebecca Gault.

Rebecca immediately recognized the shipping containers. The numbers stenciled on each were identical to codes she had been given, but that was only the first step toward verification. She leaned close to the scattered pieces until her eyes fell on twin hemispheres, the disassembled halves of the primary detonator. The primary was essentially a conventional bomb: a layer of plastique, held in place by interlocking hexagons of solid titanium. However, the detonation alone would not be enough to initiate a critical reaction. Between the explosives and the solid plutonium core was a layer of neutron rich beryllium. In the instant of the blast, the metal skin of the ball would focus the energy inward, driving the neutrons into the core, where they would shatter the reactive plutonium atoms to trigger a runaway fission reaction. Without the core, the primary was still a dangerous explosive device, albeit one of relatively low yield, but plastique was relatively stable. She felt no trepidation as she lifted one of the hemispheres and turned it over. Each hexagonal plate was stamped with a unique serial number, verifying what she already knew to be true: this was unquestionably one of the detonators from the Ripault research center.

She broke the seals on the remaining cases and repeated the process with both detonators. “Mission accomplished,” she announced. She spent another two minutes packing blocks of Semtex from her combat pouch around the detonators. Into each square of the pliable explosive compound, she carefully inserted a three-volt blasting cap, all of which were linked together with spliced sections of speaker wire. When she was done, she walked backwards, spooling out the wire as she went, to link up with her comrades outside the laboratory.

In the time it had taken for her to authenticate the three nuclear devices, her team had set charges throughout the facility. She added her wire to the web, and connected them all to a single electronic timer. “Half an hour should be enough time for us to reach the surface again.” She directed her words to Chiron. “You will be returning with us?”

He nodded.

Rebecca bit her lip. She didn’t care what fate had befallen the scientist’s companions, or at least that’s what she kept telling herself. But she couldn’t bring herself to believe that the old dodderer had coldly killed them, which suggested that they were probably still alive somewhere, perhaps bound and gagged. It was Chiron’s intention to leave them here to be buried alive when the charges they had planted eventually went off.

Oh, well. It’s on his head.

His worst nightmare had come true. He was in the desert, surrounded by his enemies, and he was going to die here.

Saeed sighed wistfully and closed his eyes, trying to remember his villa on the French Riviera, but the memory was an elusive chimera. The gravity of his present situation was too strong for the magic of daydreams.

It had been a long night. After leaving their hiding place on the banks of the Euphrates, he and Farid had rendezvoused with a dozen of his brother’s most trusted compatriots. To a man, they despised Saeed. No doubt they had heard of his earlier life as an intelligence agent and minion of the hated dictator. But their hatred of the new enemy, the American invaders, was greater, and the old proverb held true: the enemy of their enemy was now their friend. Saeed had given them a target for their rage, and so he was to be tolerated, if only temporarily.

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. Hussein, 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.”

Before Marie could protest, he was on his feet and sprinting for the center of the chamber, not far from where Hussein lay spread-eagled like a sacrifice. He had barely gone three steps when the assault rifle roared again, only this time it was in concert with a second. He was vaguely aware of the 7.62-millimeter rounds drilling through the still air all around. The snipers were firing fully automatic, the spray and pray technique. There was a skill to leading a target, and he was betting his life that these shooters had skipped that lesson. Still, all it took was one lucky shot. He dove the last two meters like a baseball player stealing second, and hunkered down behind the control box for the tram.

He barely had time to catch his breath when the first of several rounds punched clear through the thin metal frame and exited dangerously close to where he was crouching. Twisting around, he scrambled for the more substantial cover of the bumper at the end of the tracks. The heavy steel frame rang with each impact, but the rounds did not penetrate.

When a break in the assault came, he risked a quick look around the edge of his shield. There were three of them now, Arab men wearing ragged civilian clothes, and curiously bareheaded. He couldn’t begin to guess how they had discovered the complex. Maybe they were loyalist insurgents, checking a known resupply base, or maybe they were local hoodlums, hired by Rebecca or Chiron to eliminate all witnesses to their treachery. He didn’t have time to wrestle with the question, but filed it away behind a curtain, along with the overwhelming sense of guilt at having brought young Hussein to his ignominious demise.

The shooters saw him a moment later and unleashed another volley. That was all the motivation he needed. He burst from behind the bumper and sprinted for the opposite side of the complex, toward the open maw of Laboratory Two. They chased him with bullets, and it wasn’t until the lead started blasting into the stacked munitions containers that he realized just how close they were coming. Then he was gone, vanished into the maze of crates that had camouflaged the lab where Saddam’s scientists had labored to develop a nuclear weapon.

The barrage ceased almost immediately and the gunmen began warily advancing. Kismet did not try to monitor their approach. If they even caught a glimpse of him, his only plan would fail. One of the Arabs unleashed a short, random burst into the lab, but his comrades chastised him, telling him not to waste his ammunition shooting at shadows, or at least that was Kismet’s best approximation. He could hear their steps, their breathing, and the sound of crates being moved as the men pressed deeper into the lab.

There was a loud bang as one of the shipping containers was upended only a few steps away from where Kismet was concealed. Too close. They were checking the crates to see if he was hiding in one.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

The men stayed close together, careful not to flag each other with their weapons, but keeping vigil in different directions. One of them kept checking to their rear to make sure that they had not already passed by their prey. They knew enough not to separate, dashing Kismet’s hopes of subduing one and seizing his weapon.

The trio left the cluster of empty boxes behind and pressed deeper into the lab. When they reached the table with the detonators, the leader of the group stopped so suddenly he almost dropped his rifle.

Kismet made his move. From his perch, prone and pressed flat atop the wall of stacked crates, he rolled toward the exit. But as his weight shifted, the box beneath him slid and all the cartons, like some toddler’s creation with building blocks, crashed outward. Kismet hit the stone floor hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs. He gasped for air, surrounded by the chaos his movements had triggered. The three gunmen were staring right at him.

The leader moved first, swinging the muzzle of his Kalashnikov toward Kismet. Breathing or not, he knew he had to move. As he ducked, bullets started shredding the wood and plastic containers that were now his only source of concealment. Packing foam showered down like confetti, but while none of the rounds found his flesh, a shard of wood lodged in the ravaged fabric of his shirt and pierced the skin of his back.

He caught a breath, which was a good thing, and reached the right doorpost of the lab. The gunmen were randomly spraying the area, but most of their fire was concentrated on the center of the jumbled cartons. Kismet spied his goal and waited for a break in fire. When the gunmen on his right paused to reload, Kismet sprang up.

“Nice knowing you, fellows.” He slammed his hand against the red button.

There was a crack as the stays were blown out of the way, followed by an ear-splitting shriek. The large metal guillotine gate dropped so quickly that Kismet jumped back, startled. The heavy panel smashed into the cluttered crates, blasting them to splinters as it fell relentlessly, unstoppably downward.

And then it stopped.

There was about half a meter of space above the groove in the floor, where the panel ought to have firmly settled after its brief one-way journey, and the bottom of the door itself. The smashed debris of the crates, though individually flimsy, were in concert just enough to hold open the door.

Kismet breathed an oath as he stared in disbelief at the opening. He swore again as a rifle muzzle peeked out from beneath the barrier and swung in his direction. But instead of ducking away from the weapon, he leaped forward. His foot stamped down on the exposed end of the gun, and the force of the blow rolled the front sight post at the business end of the weapon, causing it to twist in the man’s grip just as the trigger was pulled.

It was like stepping on a live wire. Flame jetted from the barrel as an explosion of gases and solid projectiles exploded into the stone floor. The close proximity of the discharge caused the weapon to slam back into the gunman’s forehead and Kismet almost stumbled again, but caught himself when the weapon fell silent. He immediately snatched the rifle up, shifting his grip from the scorching hot barrel to the wooden stock, and then put it to his shoulder. As he did, another AK-47 peeked out from under the door.

Kismet fanned the trigger, unleashing a burst at the opening. One of the bullets might have hit its target, but the rest found something even luckier. The lead projectiles smashed into the fragments that were bracing the doors, perforating them just enough that the constant pressure of the door caused them to finally explode outward. The door crunched down the remaining distance, decapitating the Kalashnikov and trapping the three gunmen inside a laboratory that was already starting to grow uncomfortably warm.

Kismet sagged against the steel barrier and let the muzzle of his captured rifle drop. Marie wasn’t where he had left her, but a movement in the shadows near the doorway to Laboratory Four, the only one in the complex he had not actually seen, caught his attention. Why was she moving? He took a step in that direction, but a burst of gunfire from the tunnel mouth drove him back.

“Damn it!” How many more of these guys are there?

He didn’t linger where he was. No sooner was the oath past his lips than he was running for the opening to Laboratory One. After all that had happened since Chiron’s betrayal, the sight of the fermentation tanks was strangely welcoming. He hastened behind the foremost one and with a great heave, rolled it over on its side. The noise of the hollow metal receptacle hitting the floor reverberated like a gong throughout the complex. Guess they’ll know where I am now.

He stood alongside the fermenter, near the double-thickness of metal that formed its base, and rolled it forward like an enormous wheel, out into the open. Rifle fire instantly hammered into the tank. The bullets punched right through its wall and slammed against the interior surface hard enough to create bulging dents in the exterior. A few of the rounds went completely through, missing Kismet by scant centimeters. As a shield, the fermentation tank left a lot to be desired. He decided to give his enemies something else to worry about. With one hand still steadying still turning the base, he held the AK-47 high and fired a burst left then right. Over the thunderous din he heard a shriek of agony, and knew that at least one effort to flank his position had been thwarted.

Protected behind the gradually crumbling mobile wall of aluminum, he traversed the open area to where Marie was concealed. From the moment he made eye contact with her, she began flashing hand signals to warn him of further advancements, and each time he turned them back with a barrage from the captured rifle. Nevertheless, his defensive response was chewing through his very limited supply of ammunition. Then he saw something that took him completely by surprise. Marie raised her hand and pointed, and a jet of flame leaped from her fingertip.

She’s got a gun?

Marie snapped off several carefully aimed shots, laying down enough covering fire for him to finish the crossing. Up close, he saw that her weapon was a small .25 caliber automatic, easily enough concealed. Maybe that was why he hadn’t seen it. It was standard operating protocol for GHC personnel to be armed in a potentially hostile environment, but the sight of her with the firearm struck him as odd.

Still, she couldn’t have picked a better moment to come out of her shell, he thought. He jerked a thumb toward Laboratory Four. “Anything useful in there?”

“It’s mostly storage.” She leaned out for a split-second, and then ducked back as another volley of automatic rifle fire hammered into the fermenter. “But I did find this.”

In her hands was a misshapen gray cube. “Semtex?”

She nodded. “I cut this from a larger piece. This whole place has been wired.”

He rolled the block between his fingers. With enough time and the right material, it might be possible to fashion some kind of weapon from the chunk of polymer-bonded high explosives. The problem with Semtex, and most other plasticized blasting agents, was that they were too safe. The only effective way to set them off was with det cord or a blasting cap. He stuffed the cube in his pocket. Maybe it would come in handy later. “We’ve got to get out of here. It’s a sure bet we’ll run out of ammo before they do.”

“The trolley is gone.”

“Pierre and his new friends took it.” He ignored her inquisitive look. “It’ll be a good half hour before it comes back, provided they don’t sabotage it at the other end. That’s too long to wait.”

“So what can we do?”

He gave her a grim smile. “Plan B.”

When the fermentation tank began rolling again, trundling toward the center of the complex near the controls for the tram, the five surviving gunmen unleashed a brutal assault. While three of them maintained a withering barrage directly onto the aluminum tank, virtually shredding it in the process, two of their confederates circled wide in order to catch their prey from the side. One of them fell from a single rifle shot, but the other took cover behind the control panel and waited for the tank to get a little closer.

But Kismet and Marie were no longer using the tank as a shield. Crouched in the shadows inside the lab, they waited until the attention of their foes was firmly fixed on the rolling barrier before making their move. Kismet had taken the sniper shot that killed one of the flanking team because the man was about to discover their deception. None of the others noticed that the shot had not come from behind the fermenter.

They made it as far as the door to Laboratory Three, the crucible where Chiron’s betrayal had nearly proved fatal, before the militants noticed them. With no effective cover, Kismet chose the best possible defense. “Run!”

Bullets exploded against the cavern walls and showered them with chips of stone. Kismet felt something small and hard smack into his thigh, probably a ricochet, but kept moving in spite of the dull ache that began spreading from the point of impact. Then they reached the tunnel to the helicopter hangar and left the battle behind. The respite was brief.

As they reached the top of the passage, Marie’s arm snapped up alongside him, the pistol seeming like a natural extension of her hand, and squeezed off two shots. Kismet’s eyes had only just registered the presence of yet another Arab gunman standing in their path, when two red flowers blossomed on his chest. A third shot drilled a hole between his eyes before Kismet could bring his rifle up.

Kismet stared in stunned disbelief as the gunman dropped to his knees and pitched forward. Then the concussion of automatic rifle fire, accompanied by an eruption of stone chips from the wall behind him, returned his focus to the urgency of their situation. He sprawled forward, unconsciously pulling Marie down as well, and began crawling toward the parked helicopter.

He hadn’t seen the second shooter in his initial survey of the spacious cavern, but there were a lot of places to hide and the shots had ceased as soon as he dived for cover. “Where is he?”

Marie shook her head as she ejected the magazine from her pistol and fed in a full one. “I didn’t see. But the rest of them will be coming up the tunnel soon.”

Kismet’s only reply was a grimace. He glanced around, looking for the unseen sniper, but his gaze fell on something else instead. “I’ve got an idea. Cover me.”

He half-expected her to protest, but she gave a terse nod and rolled into a prone firing position, with the pistol locked in a two-handed grip. On that tacit signal, Kismet rose to a crouch and dashed toward the rows of drums off to the left. When the gunman opened fire, peppering the wall behind the fuel dump with 7.62-mm rounds, he dropped again.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea,” he murmured. But then he heard the distinctive pop of Marie’s pistol over the roar of the AK-47. The latter weapon fell silent first.

Without waiting for further prompting, he tipped one of the drums onto its side and commenced rolling it toward the mouth of the tunnel. Marie was on her feet again, with her back pressed against the Hind-D and her pistol at the ready. “Got him.”

Kismet withheld praise, focusing instead on the task at hand. He shoulder-slung his captured AK and drew his kukri. Using the heavy blade like a can opener, he hacked into the drum lid, cutting several triangular holes that immediately began to spew hi-grade petroleum. As the noxious fumes assaulted his mucous membranes, he pulled the lump of Semtex from his pocket and pressed it into one of the holes, then gave the drum a kick that sent it rumbling down the tunnel. The container traveled only as far as the first bend in the passage — about twenty meters — before coming to rest against the wall, but it continued to vomit jet fuel onto the sloping passage.

“Stand back!” He unlimbered the Kalashnikov and held its muzzle close to the pool of flammable liquid. A short pull on the trigger was all it took to ignite the substance, and with a whoosh, the entire passage filled with flame. For just a moment, he thought he could hear screams echoing up from the depths, but decided it was just his imagination.

Suddenly, the ground heaved under his feet and simultaneously, a pillar of smoke and dust exploded from the tunnel opening. The burning trail of jet fuel was snuffed out like a candle flame. Kismet was back on his feet in an instant, running for the side hatch of the helicopter. He threw open the door and turned to admonish Marie to get in, but the words died in his throat. The Frenchwoman seemed to be aiming her pistol right at him….

No. Someone behind me? In the helo?

When she did not fire, he took a sideways step, bringing his own weapon up as he turned. A robed figure, swathed in a kefiya wrapped Bedouin-style around both head and neck, stood in opening, his hands raised in surrender. Kismet’s finger tightened on the trigger instinctively, but he checked his fire. The man was unarmed and seemed to pose no threat. And there was something familiar about his eyes…

Kismet reversed the rifle in his hands and stabbed the wooden stock of the weapon into the man’s abdomen. As the Arab doubled over, he followed through with a butt-stroke to the back of the turbaned head. The stranger collapsed onto the stone floor beneath the extended rotor blades and did not move. With a greater degree of caution, Kismet quickly checked the interior of the Hind gun ship before encouraging Marie to join him inside. The mystery of the unarmed Arab stowaway would have to be left behind with him.

As he settled into the pilot’s seat in the lower cockpit, surrounded by banks of switches, gauges and indicator lights, the enormity of the final phase of his audacious escape plan finally hit him. The control panels were marked in Cyrillic characters, with Arabic equivalents painted in white alongside, but even though Kismet had a good grasp of Russian and a decent comprehension of the predominant language of the Iraqi people, the labels might as well have been written in ancient Sumerian cuneiform. He sensed that Marie was right behind him, silently goading him to take action, and clenched his fists to steel his nerve. Starting from the right, he began flipping switches — all of them. One by one, different systems of the aircraft became active and corresponding indicators on the panel began to glow. One of the toggles caused an audible grinding sound to vibrate through the fuselage before flipping back to the “off” position.

He eyed the lever to the side of his chair. It was actually two controls in one. By raising or lowering it, much like the hand brake in an automobile, he could adjust the pitch of the rotor blades, but it was also a twist throttle control. He tried the starter switch again, this time opening the throttle gently as he did. The grinding noise repeated, then turned into a steady vibration. Above his head, the main rotor began to turn, ever so slowly. Kismet risked a triumphant grin in Marie’s direction, then continued flipping the remaining switches.

“It’s fortunate that you know how to fly this thing,” she commented.

Kismet gave a chuckle as he feathered the throttle. “That may be overstating my abilities.”

He could tell by her long silence that she was wrestling with his comment, perhaps trying to determine if there was some idiomatic trick at work or a joke so thickly disguised as to elude her sense of humor. When she finally spoke again, it was with the caution of someone entering a minefield. “You have flown a helicopter?”

The five blades of the rotor assembly were now whipping by too fast to be seen by the naked eye, further disturbing the smoke and dust in the air of the cavern.

“Sort of,” he confessed, trying not to burden her with his inadequacy as a pilot. “This one is a little different than…well, what I’m used to.”

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.

She whipped the Hind sideways and increased pitch and throttle simultaneously so that the helicopter shifted in three dimensions away from the flight path of the Slammer. The warhead detonated at that instant, creating an expanding sphere of force as hard as concrete that pushed a wall of shrapnel toward the retreating aircraft. The underside of the Hind was hammered by a spray of debris, but only a few of the pieces actually pierced its armor. The shock wave was far more destructive.

“What was—” The operator’s inquiry was cut off as the sat phone flew from Kismet’s grasp and shattered against a bulkhead. Flailing for a handhold and slammed against his restraints, he barely noticed.

And then the helicopter leveled out and dived back down toward the dunes. Marie was still in control and they were still alive. But three missiles! Even my luck’s not that good.

Another light started blinking on the control panel, alongside a gauge which measured remaining fuel in pounds. The needle registered below the lowest mark. Shrapnel from the missile blast had evidently ripped through a fuel tank and the resulting hemorrhage had splashed their entire reserve supply across the desert sand. Before this fact could fully register, Kismet saw the missile-warning blink on again. All he could do was sit back and wait for the inevitable.

But Marie was not ready to give up. As a second AMRAAM drew close, she hauled back on the cyclic, executing a heavy-G turn that would have made the fighter pilots green with either envy or nausea. The Hind’s nose thrust skyward as it started to climb…and then everything went to hell.

The Mil helicopters of the Hind family had served the Russian military and its export partners well for more than twenty years and were virtually the equal of their western counterparts the Boeing AH-64 Apache and the Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk. But there was one design flaw which had plagued the helicopter in hostile engagements, most notably in Afghanistan where warriors of the Mujahideen had managed to hold their own in a decade long war of attrition against the superior technology of the Soviet superpower: the Hind had a nasty habit of cutting off its own tail.

When Marie threw the helicopter into its sharp climb, the rotor assembly tilted back to the furthest extreme so that the rotor vanes were whipping over the tail boom with mere millimeters to spare. But the G-forces changed that. The entire aircraft flexed, as if the helicopter was trying to climb a literal hill, and in that instant, the deadly arc of the main rotor passed through the tail boom. A horrific shudder vibrated through the craft, accompanied by an ear-splitting shriek of rending metal, and then the fuselage, no longer stabilized by the sideways turning blades of the rudder, began to whip violently around beneath the rotors. Kismet felt as though his eyes were being ripped from his skull. He was pinned against the web belts that held him in place, unable to do anything to relieve the pressure of the centrifuge. But he could tell they were falling and the AMRAAM was still chasing them.

Marie’s desperate maneuver had bought them a few more seconds. The missile’s momentum had carried it past the aircraft without detonating, and although it never lost its lock, the projectile had to travel several kilometers in order to swing around and home in on the stricken Hind.

Somehow, Marie managed to boost the throttle in tandem with the jet engines, pushing the helicopter’s thrust until its airspeed was more than seventy knots. For just a moment, the Mi-25 leveled out and control was regained. The force of onrushing air against the fuselage straightened their attitude like a weathervane in a stiff wind. It was the only appropriate response to the loss of a tail rotor, but it didn’t allow for a lot of maneuverability. About all they could do was stay aloft until the AMRAAM caught them.

The needle on the instrument panel registered their rapid descent. Marie was trying to put the helicopter down. Maybe there was still a chance. But then the turbines coughed and fell silent. The last of the fuel had been consumed. Although the rotors continued to turn, grinding out their considerable momentum, they were nevertheless powering down. Kismet could feel the fuselage begin to twist with the torque and all of a sudden it was gyrating again. The Hind auto-rotated, unable to sustain lift, but plummeted more like a feather than a stone. Kismet mentally braced himself for impact. There was nothing he could do to prepare physically.

When it finally came, the crash seemed almost anti-climactic. Marie had retracted the landing gear before beginning the aerobatic evasive maneuvers, but had deployed the wheels to help stabilize the craft once the rudder was gone. The shock absorbers in the struts absorbed most of the impact and the sand helped dissipate the rest. Still, gravity remained a force to be reckoned with, and when the Hind slammed into the desert floor, the force crumpled the fuselage and pounded down on its occupants like a pile driver. Still, Kismet reckoned it no worse than the five static line parachute jumps he had made to earn his Airborne wings as an ROTC cadet. Incredibly, they had survived a helicopter crash.

But before either of them could make a move to extricate themselves from the ill-fated craft, a second impact blasted against them, followed by a shock wave, and then darkness.

Fifteen

It was impossible to tell if he had lost consciousness. The last thing he remembered was the darkness and it remained the only constant. He blinked — no change — then reached out to see if his hands encountered anything. After a few moments of searching, he found the cyclic stick, right where it ought to be.

Well, that’s a good sign. But why is it so dark in here?

More probing revealed that he was still strapped in to his chair, and that it was tilted over until it was nearly horizontal; the helicopter had come to rest on its left side. It took some more doing, but he managed to locate his kukri and sever the straps, at which point he fell against the interior bulkhead.

“Marie?” The sound of his voice in the benighted silence was a little unnerving. “Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

“I…I am not hurt.” Her words sounded as cautious as he felt. “At least. I believe I am uninjured.”

He followed the sound of her voice, crawling along the canted wall until he could hear the sound of her breathing. As he drew closer, he remembered that he still had some of the Cyalume sticks in his waist pack. “I’m going to give us some light. Cover your eyes for a moment.”

In the pale green glow of the chem-light, he saw her, suspended in the flight chair like a prisoner enduring some kind of grisly torture. He cut her free and eased her onto the bulkhead. Beyond the bubble windows of her cockpit, there was a dull gray nothingness.

“What happened?”

Kismet moved closer to the Perspex windscreen. “I think we got buried somehow. Maybe we hit a soft dune and it collapsed over us. Or maybe that last missile hit close enough to make the sand behave like a liquid.”

“Buried?” Marie echoed hollowly.

“We’re lucky it didn’t pulverize us.” He turned to her and smiled reassuringly. “Hey, you saved us. You picked a hell of a good time to come out of your shell.”

But his intended encouragement had the wrong effect. She gazed at him for a moment, an emerald moistness gathering at the corners of her eyes, then burst into uncontrollable sobs. Kismet held her tightly, grateful that she had managed to delay her breakdown as long as she had.

Things got better once Kismet succeeded in opening one of the door panels. He chose the one on the left, what was now the bottom surface of the helicopter, correctly reasoning that there would be no external pressure weighing against it, nor a deluge of suffocating sand as soon as it was drawn back. With the coarse desert earth thus revealed, he set to work digging with the blade of his Gurkha knife. It was a tedious and frustrating task. They scooped sand by the handful into the interior of the aircraft, but the hole kept refilling itself as more grains collapsed in from the sides.

“So why didn’t you tell me you could fly that helicopter?” he inquired, offhandedly. He didn’t want Marie to know the desperation that he now felt. If he couldn’t dig them out, the Hind would be their tomb.

“You seemed to know what you were doing,” she answered, almost sheepishly. “I didn’t want to interfere.”

“I’m glad you did. But where did you learn to fly like that? That was combat flying. Don’t try to tell me you learned that at some weekend flight school.”

She gave a wan smile, looking almost sickly in the glow of the chem-light. “I was in the military as a young woman.”

“Forgive me for saying it, but you don’t seem the type.”

“It was required.”

Kismet paused in his labors to ponder this. France had a policy of compulsive military service dating back almost a century, but it applied almost exclusively to males of eligible age. In recent years, the policy had been changed to promote other forms of civil service in order to professionalize the armed forces, and additionally to include females as well, but the years of Marie’s service must surely have predated that. “I thought the law applied only to men.”

She blinked at him. “Forgive me, I misspoke. What I meant was that it was necessary for me to serve in the military in order to reach other goals. I showed an aptitude for aviation and was trained as a helicopter pilot. I hated it.”

He nodded slowly and resumed digging, but now that Marie had regained a degree of composure, she took her turn asking questions. “Nick, what happened back there?”

It was the question he had been dreading; answering it would mean accepting some very difficult truths. “Pierre… I don’t know why, but he shut us in that lab.”

“Deliberately?”

Kismet nodded. “Maybe he didn’t know about the self-destruct, but he shut us in and made no effort to help us get out.”

“And where did he go afterward?”

“We were followed by another group. I think they might have been spies or an elite commando force. Pierre was working with them all along.” He stopped speaking as the gravity of what he was saying finally hit home. “He played me for a fool. All that talk about religious artifacts was a diversion to keep me interested, so that I would lead them to what they were really after.”

“And what was that?”

No harm in telling her. “French-made nuclear detonators.”

She let out a gasp. “There were nuclear weapons in there?”

“They weren’t armed. Pierre seemed to know all about the deal the French government made with Iraq years ago. Nuke technology for oil leases. I guess they were afraid someone would find out what they had done.”

“Did they take the detonators with them?”

It was an odd question, enough so that Kismet stopped digging. “It didn’t look like it. I think they just wanted to destroy them.”

She seemed satisfied with that. “And what of the second group? The men that killed Hussein?”

“Insurgents. I’m sure there are quite a few high-level officers who know about that place still on the loose. Maybe they were hoping to find a weapons cache or something.”

She nodded again and at that instant the sand where Kismet was digging suddenly fell away, disappearing into a newly opened funnel. There was a gleam of daylight beyond. Heartened, he jumped down into the hole and made an abrupt transition into the desert heat. Shading his eyes with a hand, he looked back to find that the gap had already been covered over with sliding sand. Part of the main rotor shaft — the blades evidently broken off during the crash — extended from the side of a massive sand dune, but that was the only sign that a helicopter had gone down in the desert. The Hind was completely buried.

“Marie!” He climbed back up the hill searching for hole. As if to answer his summons, the Frenchwoman abruptly burst from the wall in front of him and tumbled down the slope. He tried to catch her, but the uncertain terrain upon which he stood crumbled away and they both rolled to the bottom of the gully entangled like lovers. Kismet felt her shaking in his arms and thought she was crying again. It took him a moment to realize that she was laughing.

He joined her mirth for more than a minute, but when their peals of gaiety gradually stopped echoing through the dune canyons, the oppressive reality of their new peril settled in. The desert was perhaps not as hot a furnace as the one from which they had escaped in Laboratory Three, but its death sentence was no less immutable. The sun was only beginning its climb into the eastern sky, and already the temperature was soaring. To make matters worse, they were both severely dehydrated from their earlier ordeal and had no means of replenishing their bodily reserves. Kismet sat back on the simmering sand and began reviewing their options. It was a short list.

“As I see it, we have two choices. We can continued north on foot and pray that we find water before we collapse. Or we can stay here and hope that someone sends a group out to investigate our helicopter.”

“How likely is that?”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “If I were calling the shots, I’d want to know who was flying a gunship across the desert. Remember, Saddam, his sons, and most of his generals are still on the run. But that helo is hidden pretty well. They may already have flown over and not seen it. If that’s the case, then we’ll die for sure if we stay.”

Marie gazed across a landscape shimmering with convection waves. “We’ve come so far, survived so much. It cannot end like this. I say we take our chances in the wilderness.”

Her determination, however naïve, was inspirational. But the oppressive mid-morning sun quickly prompted a compromise. They would seek the shelter of the crashed helicopter until dusk, making the desert trek in the cool of evening. They spent the better part of an hour in excavating a passage back into the buried aircraft, after which Kismet began ransacking the Hind in search of anything that might improve their odds of survival. Unfortunately, the Iraqis had not provisioned the aircraft for the eventuality of a crash in the desert. There were no water cans or foodstuffs to be found, nor any extra garments or blankets to ward off exposure. A first-aid kit yielded a roll of gauze bandages and a Mylar film space blanket, but that was the extent of their supplies. Anything else would be the product of salvage and ingenuity.

There was enough fabric in the seat cushions to fashion a pair of rudimentary turbans, and after swathing one of these around his head, Kismet ventured once more into the open. Reckoning that their most immediate need was water, he began fashioning a solar still to reclaim a few precious drops of moisture out of the air. He began by digging a shallow pit, which he covered with the space blanket. The reflective film was a poor choice for what he wanted — a piece of clear plastic would have been ideal — but he had to work with what he had. Like a miniature greenhouse, the Mylar helped create a super-heated pocket of air, which in turn caused condensation to form on the inside of the blanket. A small weight tied in the center helped the dew-like droplets to run down into a receptacle, in this case the empty plastic box which had held the first-aid kit, but the yield was pitifully small. There was barely enough water after two hours to moisten their parched lips.

Aside from that, they did little else during that long day. It had been more than twenty-four hours since either of them had slept, and the trials they had faced leading up to their escape into the wasteland had left them fatigued beyond the limits of human endurance, but even rest in the oven-like confines of their shelter was exhausting. Finally, when neither of them could stand inaction any longer, they struck out across the dunes. Huddled beneath the foil-like space blanket to ward off the worst of the sun’s wrath, they commenced trekking in the waning hours of the afternoon.

No words were exchanged during that forced march — no complaints were made, nor any encouragement given. Marie had evidently found a reserve of heretofore untapped energy and kept up with Kismet without any cajoling, but that pace was barely a crawl. Not only was their speed pitiful, but to ensure that they were not wandering in circles, Kismet had to make frequent pauses to check their heading. Without a compass, or even a trustworthy wristwatch, he had to use the shadow stick method; he would place his knife upright in the sand and mark the tip of the shadow. Ten minutes later, he would check again, and a line drawn between the two gave a fairly accurate east to west reference. It was tedious and time consuming, but it was at least a guarantee that they were still moving toward their goal.

By nightfall, Kismet was reeling from the effects of dehydration. Having only just recovered from heat exhaustion, he knew that he was particularly at risk for a second bout, and this time it would undoubtedly prove fatal. As the heat of day boiled away into space following dusk, he could feel the fever raging within his flesh. Still he marched on.

Without the shadows to guide him, he looked instead to the stars. Celestial navigation at least could be performed while in motion. Their rate of progress however continued to slow. Pressed together with the Mylar blanket pulled tight around their shoulders, they moved at a shuffle, each trusting the other to stay upright. Ultimately, neither one could recall who fell first. They collapsed together, shivering against the cold and embracing like lovers, and waited for the end to come.

For the second time in a week, Kismet awoke with an intravenous needle in his arm and a solution of saline flowing into his veins. The bedside manner of his savior in this instance could not compare to that of the ersatz Dr. Rebecca Gault. Even without opening his eyes, he knew that he was in a vehicle; the noise of the engine and the vibration of the tires jouncing over the rough desert terrain was unmistakable. Suddenly remembering that he was in a war zone, he tried to sit up, but succeeded only in banging his head against an obstruction.

“Easy on, mate.” A reassuring hand gripped his shoulder.

The words were in English, spoken with a British accent, which at least relieved his worst concerns. It was dark in the vehicle’s interior and he could not distinguish the face behind the voice. “Marie?” he croaked.

“The lass is in bad shape, but no worse than you.” There was a chuckle. “The devil must be on your arse, because it’s a sure thing you two escaped from hell.”

“How did you find us?”

A second voice, more sophisticated than the first and with a slightly different inflection, issued from the darkness. “Your message eventually got through to CENTCOM, but that put everyone in a bit of a spot. The Yanks didn’t want to admit that they had just shot down a pair of UN envoys and they dragged their heels organizing a response. I think they were hoping you’d expire out here and save them some embarrassment.”

“Then I guess I’m lucky Her Majesty’s soldiers were a little more decisive.”

An uncomfortable silence followed, as if the unseen conversants were waiting for the comment to be forgotten before moving on. “We knew approximately where you went down, but had a devil of a time finding the site. Eventually we crossed your trail and followed behind until we found you.”

“Well, it hardly seems adequate, but thanks.”

“Anytime, Lieutenant Kismet.”

The word, pronounced “lef-tenant” caught him off guard. “I’m not—”

”Oh, I know you gave up your commission. But you still carry one of our knives, and that makes you one of us.”

“You’re Gurkhas?” Comprehension dawned. There was an old axiom about the loyalty of the Gurkhas; once you earned it, it never failed. Now at least he knew why the soldiers had not been willing to let the awkward situation simply vanish in the desert sands.

“Captain Christopher Sabian-Hyde, formerly of the Sixth Queen Elizabeth’s Own Gurkha Rifles. I was a wet behind the ears ensign — Second Lieutenant — back in ‘92, as I believe you were also. You were leading my platoon out there, Kismet.”

For a fleeting moment, he relived that awful mission. Of the soldiers who had gone into the desert with him that fateful night, only one other man had survived. “It wasn’t my call.”

Sabian-Hyde made a dismissive grunt. “You misunderstand. That was our finest hour since World War II. My only regret is that I wasn’t out there with you.”

“Believe me, I’d have traded places with you in a heartbeat.”

“I imagine so.” He sensed the officer smiling in the darkness. “Water under the bridge. We all get our chance for glory. It seems mine has finally come.”

It was only when they arrived at the British command post outside of Basra that the enormity of Sabian-Hyde’s decision to mount a rescue operation hit home for Kismet. The southern city, nominally pacified by more than a brigade of British soldiers, remained a hotbed of insurgent activity. Dozens of Her Majesty’s fighters had fallen in one of the longest battles of the war, many to battlefield ruses such as faked surrenders or ambulances hiding ambush parties of Fedayeen paramilitaries. The small force of infantrymen that had slipped away to locate the crashed helicopter had been drawn from the ranks of those rotating back from the front lines for a brief respite. These battle-weary veterans had traveled more than three hundred kilometers across the wilderness to find a man who their superiors preferred to simply let perish. Had the unsanctioned venture ended in disaster, the onus would have rested heaviest upon Captain Sabian-Hyde.

The British camp stood in stark contrast to the American operation at the Baghdad airport. Not only had the month of hard fighting to capture and occupy the critical oil export hub taken its toll on men and equipment, but the British Army was notoriously underprovisioned to begin with. It had been counted a major coup when a large cache of combat boots meant for Iraqi regular army units had been seized and distributed to British soldiers whose own standard issue footwear was literally falling apart in the harsh conditions. Unfortunately for Kismet, there was not a spare stitch of clothing in the camp to replace his own tattered and scorched garments.

The former Gurkha officer found them again in the field hospital where a surgeon was bandaging their many wounds and continuing to infuse them with fluids, analgesics and antibiotics. Kismet’s physical condition elicited a sympathetic grimace. “Where will you go now?”

Marie had asked him the same question and unlike the British officer, she was in possession of all the facts. Well, maybe not all the facts, he thought. He wanted to say simply that his next destination was home, but deep down he knew absenting himself from the war would not give him peace from the questions that ate at him like a malaise. The specter of Chiron, standing on the other side of the steel door with his finger on the fail-safe button, haunted him whenever he closed his eyes. There was only one way to exorcize that ghost, only one place where he would find answers. “Paris.”

Sabian-Hyde nodded. “I wish I were going with you. There’s a convoy bound for Kuwait City leaving in an hour. I can get you on it.”

“I appreciate that.”

“From there, you’ll be on your own.” He gave Kismet another appraising glance. “I hope you brought your charge card.”

Because she was the executive assistant to the director of the Global Heritage Commission, Marie was able to access a special discretionary account and arrange a wire transfer at the National Bank of Kuwait. She purchased two one-way first-class fares on a direct flight to Paris the following afternoon, and had enough cash left over for food, accommodations and new clothes. She also acquired some disturbing information. “Pierre is back in Europe,” she announced after leaving the bank manager’s office. “He used the account to charter a helicopter flight from Hillah to Baghdad, then flew to Geneva.”

Kismet did not vocalize the curse that was on his lips. Chiron hadn’t wasted any time getting out of Iraq. “Was he alone?”

“It’s hard to say. All I know is how much he spent and where. I could find out more by contacting the office.”

He shook his head. “Not yet. I don’t know what his game is, but I don’t want to spook him.”

A short taxi ride brought them to the Sheraton Kuwait Hotel and Towers where, despite a dour reception from the concierge, they were able to get clothes, rooms and food, in that order. Kismet purchased a powder-blue cotton summer suit with a subtle silk tie and a pair of lightweight huarache sandals. The airy shoes were a pleasant relief from the boots, which despite protecting him through so many trials, were beyond any hope of recovery. A brief shower, while welcome, was an excruciating reminder of how much punishment he had endured, and when he gazed at his reflection in the mirror, it was a haggard wraith who stared back.

But if his own appearance came as a surprise, then Marie’s transformation was nothing less than miraculous. Her simple red satin cocktail dress accentuated the femininity that Kismet had initially counted a liability. Away from the war zone and its practical necessities, the woman that she was had re-emerged. She had lost weight and her cheeks were ruddy from exposure, but somehow she made it all look good. As they left her room, she gave him an impulsive hug.

By some unspoken agreement, their conversation never touched on the events they had recently experienced, nor did they discuss what lay ahead. Rather, they made small talk about likes and dislikes, favorite books and hobbies, anything and everything, so long as it had nothing to do with the matter weighing most heavily on their hearts. When their dessert was cleared away, they agreed that it was easily the best meal they had ever eaten, though in fact neither of them could remember now what the main course had been. Arm in arm, they left the restaurant and made their way back to the rooms.

Kismet was not surprised at all when Marie took his hands, stared up into his eyes and whispered, “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

But much later, when she lay sleeping nestled against his body, his mind wandered over all the pieces of the puzzle that just didn’t quite fit, and he found himself wondering if he really knew who she was.