the dry brown earth.
He pushed himself away from the aircraft and staggered to meet the
running women.
Go back! he croaked in his own terrible distress, with the grip of his
G-suit strangling his movements and the evaporating fuel cold as ice in
his air and down his face.
Within the battered hull of the Mirage a puddle of Avtur had been heated
by the white-hot shell of the jet compressor. its low volatility at
last was raised to flash point and a dying spark from the electronic
equipment was enough to ignite it.
With a dull but awful roar, the Mirage bloomed with dark crimson flame
and sooty black smoke, the wind ripped the flames outwards in great
streamers and pennants that engulfed all around them, and David
staggered onwards in the midsts of the roaring furnace that seemed to
consume the very air.
He held his breath, if he had not, the flame would have scorched his
lungs. He closed his eyes tightly against the agony and ran on blindly.
His body and his limbs were protected by the fireproof pressure suit and
boots and gloves, but his head was bare and soaked with jet fuel.
As he ran his head burned like a torch. His hair frizzled off, in a
stinking puff of flame and the skin of his scalp and neck and face were
exposed. The flames burnt his ears off and most of his nose, they
flayed off his skin in a blistering sheet and then they ate into the raw
flesh, they burnt away his lips and exposed his teeth and part of the
bone of his jaw. They ate through his eyelids and stripped the living
meat from his cheeks.
David ran on through the burning air and smoke, and he did not believe
that such pain was possible. It exceeded all his imaginings and swamped
all the senses of his body and mind, but he knew he must not scream.
The pain was a blackness and the vivid colours of flame in his tightly
closed eyes, it was a roaring in his ears like all the winds of the
world, and in his flesh it was the goads and whips and burning hooks of
hell itself.
But he knew he could not let this terrible fire enter his body and he
ran on without screaming.
The women from the orchard were brought up short by the sudden forest of
flame and black smoke that rose up in front of them, engulfing the
squashed-insect body of the aircraft, and closing around the running
figure of the pilot.
It was a solid impenetrable wall of heat and smoke that blotted out all
ahead of them, and forced them to draw back, awed and horrified, before
its raging hot breath. They stood in a small group, panting and
wild-eyed.
Then abruptly a freak gust of wind opened the heavy oily curtains of
smoke, and out of them stumbled a dreadful thing with a scorched and
smoking body and a head of flame.
Blindly it came out of the smoke, one arm hanging and its feet dragging
and staggering in the soft earth.
They stared at this thing in horror, frozen in silence, and it came
towards them.
Then a strapping girl, with a strong brown body and a man of dark hair,
uttered a cry of compassion, and raced to meet him.
As she ran, she stripped off her heavy voluminous skirt of thick wool,
leaving her strong brown legs bare.
She reached David and she swirled the skirt over his head, smothering
the flames that still ate into his flesh.
The other women followed her, using their clothing to wrap him as he
fell and rolled on the earth.
Only then did David begin to scream, from that lipless mouth with the
exposed teeth. It was a sound that none of them would ever forget. As
he screamed the eyes were open, with the lashes and brow and most of the
lids burned away. The eyes were dark indigo blue in the glistening mask
of wet scorched meat, and the little blood vessels, sealed by the heat,
popped open and dribbled and spurted. As he screamed, the blood and
lymph bubbled from the nostril holes where his nose had been, and his
body writhed and heaved and convulsed as spasm after spasm of unbearable
agony hit him.
The women had to hold him down to control his struggles, and to prevent
him tearing with clawed fingers at the ruins of his face.
He was still screaming when the doctor from the kibbutz slashed open the
sleeve of his pressure suit with a scalpel and pressed the morphine
needle into the twitching jumping muscles of his arm.
The Brig saw the last bright radar image fade from the plot and heard
the young radar officer report formally, No further contact. And a
great silence fell on the command bunker.
They were all watching him. He stood hunched over the plot and his big
bony fists were clasped at his sides.
His face was stiff and expressionless, but his eyes were terrible.
It seemed that the frantic voices of his two pilots still echoed from
the speakers above his head, as they called to each other in the
extremes of mortal conflict.
They had all heard David's voice, hoarse with sorrow and fear.
Joel! No, Joe! Oh God, no! and they knew what that meant. They had
lost them both, and the Brig was still stunned by the sudden
incalculable turn that the sortie had taken.
At the moment he had lost control of his fighters he had known that
disaster was unavoidable, and now his son was dead. He wanted to cry
out aloud, to protest against the futility of it. He closed his eyes
tightly for a few seconds, and when he opened them, he was in control
again.
General alert, he snapped. All squadrons to "Red" standby, he knew they
faced an international crisis. I want air cover over the area they went
down. They may have ejected. Put up two Phantom flights and keep an
umbrella over them. I want helicopters sent in immediately, with
paratrooper guards and medical teams - Command bunker moved swiftly into
general alert procedure.
Get me the Prime Minister, he said, he was going to have to do a lot of
explaining, and he spared a few vital seconds to damn David Morgan
roundly and bitterly.
The airforce doctor took one look at David's charred and scorched head
and he swore softly. We'll be lucky to save this one.
Loosely he swathed the head in Vaseline bandages and they hurried with
David's blanket-wrapped body on the stretcher to the Bell 2o5 helicopter
waiting in the orchard.
The Bell touched down on the helipad at Hadassah Hospital and a medical
team was ready for him. One hour and fifty-three minutes after the
Mirage hit the irrigation canal David had passed through the sterile
lock into the special burns unit on the third floor of the hospital,
into a quiet and secluded little world where everybody wore masks and
long green sterile robes and the only contact with the outside world was
through the double-glazed windows and even the air he breathed was
scrubbed and cleaned and filtered.
However, David was enfolded in the soft dark clouds of morphine and he
did not hear the quiet voices of the masked figures as they worked over
him. It's third degree over the entire area - No attempt to clean it or
touch it, sister, not until it stabilizes. I am going to spray with
Epigard, and we'll go to intramuscular Tetracycline four-hourly against
infection, It will be two weeks before we dare touch it. 'Very well,
doctor. Oh, and sister, fifteen milligrams of morphine six hourly. We
are going to have a lot of pain with this one. Pain was infinity, an