‘It looks like a Hind.’
‘Do the Egyptians have any Mi-24s?’ Sweet asked.
‘No,’ Karanski said. He looked across to the skip-per again. Bookerman was flying the MH-53J like he was on auto-pilot. ‘It looks like we’ve got an Ivan out back who wants to play games. Do you want to call this thing off?’
Bookerman’s face glowed in the reflection from the FLIR screen. ‘No. How long to the way-point?’ The valley between the two peaks was a black hole in the centre of the picture.
‘About twenty seconds.’
‘OK, let’s take him with us.’
‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’
‘No Ivan’s going to push me around the sky.’
‘He’s diving,’ Salva said, excitement in his voice. ‘He’s right down on the deck now. Same height as us. Is this guy crazy or something?’
‘This has got to be Shabanov’s idea of an initiative test,’ Bookerman said through clenched teeth. ‘OK, hotshot, eat this.’
The MH-53J roared between the two peaks into the wadi.
Karanski logged the way-point. ‘Mark.’
Bookerman rolled the helicopter into a bend and felt the gs come on. Two times gravity, he calculated, from the way his eyes bulged in their sockets. The very edge of the Sikorsky’s structural tolerances. ‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s still hanging in there — real close, too,’ Leiffer said.
Bookerman threw the MH-53J into another sharp bend and heard Leiffer’s curse over his headphones as the engineer/scanner was hurled against the wall of the helicopter.
‘Check your harnesses, all of you,’ Karanski said.
Leiffer picked himself off the floor and gave his harness a strong tug. It was still buckled securely to the cabin wall. He crawled back to the half-open loading ramp, his eyes straining against the dust cloud behind them.
‘He’s fifty feet behind,’ Leiffer said.
The nose of the Mi-24J, its blister canopy bulging like insect eyes, edged forward.
Bookerman swore and advanced the power setting. The new Hind was good. He pushed the Sikorsky lower, until it was ten feet off the deck. ‘How’s that?’
Leiffer wriggled further into the slipstream. ‘He’s somewhere in the dust storm thrown up by our rotors. He’s got to pull up now. No one can fly in that stuff.’
Suddenly, there was a warning shout from Sweet. ‘There are freaking camels up ahead.’
Only then did Bookerman catch them on the FLIR, the camels’ bodies showing up as two giant heatspots in the centre of the picture. ‘Where the fuck did they come from?’ He pulled back on the stick, his mind filled with the FLIR’s negative image of a bedouin roused from sleep, the fear in his features detailed on the edge of the TV screen.
The Sikorsky was up to two hundred feet before Bookerman even knew it. He pushed the stick for-ward and felt his stomach lurch towards his throat. Two hundred feet on the day and the shoulder-launched SAMs would have him. He had to get down on the deck again, fast.
‘We’re approaching the target area,’ Karanski said. He was counting off the miles on the multi-function display in his head.
From his prone position on the ramp, Leiffer watched, a mixture of fascination and horror on his face, as the nose of the Hind edged out of the maelstrom boiling up behind them.
He yelled a warning and Bookerman sucked yet more power from the engines. The vibration jarred his teeth, the very marrow of his bones, making even thought laborious. The ground was flashing past so close he felt he could reach out and touch it.
‘My God,’ Leiffer said, his eyes locked onto the nose of the Russian gunship. He could see the pilot hunched over his controls in the upper cockpit and the gunner immediately below.
‘What the fuck’s happening back there?’ Karanski shouted.
Leiffer shook himself. ‘He’s still out there.’ He paused. ‘I think he’s trying to get past us.’
Up ahead the wadi began to widen. Karanski counted down their estimated arrival from the time-on-target function on the Doppler.
Bookerman tightened his grip on the cyclic and felt the sweat ooze between his gloved fingers.
‘Thirty seconds to target,’ Karanski said.
‘He’s going past us now,’ Leiffer said. ‘I’m losing him.’
‘I’ve got him,’ Sweet said, as the Hind slid alongside his position. ‘Easy as you go, skipper, this guy’s in the fucking hair-cut business. His rotor’s about three feet from ours.’
The Hind started to pull past them.
Karanski: ‘Twenty seconds to target.’
Knowing he had been beaten, Bookerman chopped power and pulled up out of the wadi. ‘Fuck the SAMs, this guy’s trying to get us all killed.’
The Hind filled Bookerman’s FLIR picture. Beside him, Karanski cranked up the magnification on his FLIR scope so that he had a clear view into the Mil’s cockpit. He fully expected to see the Russian gunner looking over his shoulder and giving them the bird. What he saw instead was pandemonium. The pilot, in the raised rear seat, was crouched over his instruments, hands darting left and right, as he threw switches and checked dials. When the gunner did turn, he was craning for a view of his pilot. Karanski saw that his eyes were wide with fear. The blaze of warning lights across the instrument panel told him why. Suddenly, the Hind pulled up like a striking cobra, its nose pointing towards the stars. Bookerman didn’t even have time to exclaim his surprise. He thought momentarily that the Hind was trying to follow him up into the sky, although later he realized that no helicopter pilot would have tried such a manoeuvre.
Travelling at close to two hundred miles per hour, the Hind had almost nine times the force of gravity driven through its airframe. Its five blades sheered off at the hub as one, sending the helicopter into a ballistic arc that was cut short by a rock stack jutting out of the desert floor. For some reason, it did not explode, despite the cascade of sparks that lit up the night sky. The impact broke the fuselage in two, the tail boom burying itself in the desert floor of the wadi amid a cloud of dust, the cockpit and cabin flying on another hundred feet before being crushed against the unrelenting face of the wadi’s sides.
Inside the Sikorsky, nobody spoke for a long time. Bookerman had seen enough to know that there were no surviviors. He pulled the Sikorsky into a turn that would take it back over the crash site.
Karanski’s burst transmission to Wadi Qena was succinct. They had a helicopter down in the desert.
Girling walked briskly along the street known as Al-Mu’izz, a lone focus among the traders and the faithful. He was the only foreigner in the street, the sole ‘agnabi.
It was a little before nine. In the distance, he could just hear the muezzin calling from his platform high above the Mu’ayyad mosque. The street traders were already into their stride. Girling tucked his head down and tried to mingle with the droves of men heading for the prayer meeting, but it was impossible to escape the attention of the shopkeepers for long.
They dangled wares of leather, cotton, silver, and gold before his eyes. Despite their persuasiveness, he steadfastly but politely refused them.
As he pressed further into the heartland of the old quarter, he began to sense a new mood. The traders looked at him with deepening suspicion. It was as if they knew he had not come to their street to buy. For all his attempts to appear like an innocent tourist — guide-book in his hand and camera round his neck — Girling knew he was fooling nobody. As more and more shopkeepers retreated into the shade of their stalls, their overtures rejected, he imagined he heard the rasp of their curses behind him.
When he thought about Lazan’s warning and what Mona’s father had told him, he tingled with the realization that the street could swallow him in a moment and no one on the outside would be the wiser, except, perhaps, Sharifa. He had phoned her first thing that morning to tell her he was heading for the Mu’ayyad mosque. When he explained about the Guide, she begged him not to go. But he had made up his mind the previous night and nothing was going to deter him, not even the Mukhabarat. He had slipped from the apartment via the fire escape, neatly avoiding his two minders out the front.