With adrenaline coursing through his veins, Kismet could not accurately judge the flow of time. It seemed that several minutes had passed without anything else happening. The only sounds he could hear were the extraordinarily loud percussions of his own heartbeat.
And then the earth moved.
The blast felt like a slap from God, yet Kismet knew he was experiencing only the outer edge of the shockwave: a bubble of displaced air pushed away from the detonation. In the same instant, the roar of the explosion washed over him. There was a deafening rush of noise that brought with it a shower of sand particles and shattered clay bricks.
Through the ringing inside his head, he could distinguish the staccato pops of gunfire. The soldiers were mounting a counterattack against the perceived source of the threat. Kismet doubted the young infantrymen knew where to direct their fire. Most were probably shooting at anything that moved, but in the omnidirectional hailstorm of metal-jacketed ball ammunition, the odds did not favor the unseen enemy. He risked a look.
The wall of the terminal had taken a direct hit, leaving an enormous wound in the brick structure. Through the hole and the thick curtain of smoke and dust, Kismet could see the battle in progress, the young soldiers alternately firing and advancing across the tarmac toward the outer perimeter of the airport, several hundred meters away. The aircraft which had brought him across the desert sands sat impotent and vulnerable, only a stone’s throw from the blast radius.
Adrenaline was still distorting his perception of time, giving him a strange clarity of thought. He became aware of the news crews, rushing forward as if invincible in order to capture scenes of the battle on videotape. Their eagerness seemed ghoulish, but Kismet knew that in their own way, they were as dedicated as the soldiers fighting the battle on both sides. The journalists were true believers in the cause of history. If that explained their enthusiasm, it did not entirely excuse them. Most of the world’s problems could be laid at the feet of the true believers.
The focus of the battle seemed to shift, and Kismet saw a white finger of vapor reaching out across the paved runway. RPG, he thought. A rocket-propelled grenade.
Even as the munition was released it gave away the location of its user, and in a heartbeat, the place from which it had originated became the primary target for the soldiers. But no amount of retaliatory fire could alter the trajectory of the grenade as it streaked toward the terminal. Kismet covered his unnamed companion once more, waiting for the inevitable explosive climax.
The RPG streaked past the nose of the idle jet, missing it by less than ten meters, and slammed into the wall of the terminal, just to the left of the first impact. The orderly matrix of bricks blew apart in a rough circle, showering the interior of the building with deadly fragments. Kismet saw several people struck, some seriously, by the debris. Closer to the blast, a section of the wall that had initially survived intact, now teetered inward and collapsed as a single massive entity onto a group of huddling relief workers and soldiers.
Disdaining his own safety, Kismet sprang erect and darted across the terminal. Chaos had replaced the orderliness of the greeting area. Shrapnel and brick splinters were everywhere, and some who had survived with only minor injuries, or perhaps none at all, now rushed back and forth across the terminal in search of safety. Most simply remained flat on the ground, awaiting the next blast that might finish them all.
A number of figures struggled from the outer edge of the collapsed wall. Kismet caught a glimpse of red hair and instantly recognized the woman from the plane. Her expression remained purposeful as she turned back toward the devastated tableau, immediately plunging her hands into the debris to effect the rescue of her comrades. He was at her side a moment later, lending the strength of his legs and back to the effort of lifting the wall. This time, she did not spurn his presence.
Working together, they shifted a section of wall nearly two-meters square, partially revealing two motionless forms: a US soldier and one of the Red Cross workers. Kismet dug at a scattering of bricks that still pinned the legs of the latter individual, enough so that the woman was able to slip her hands beneath the fallen aid worker's shoulders in order to drag him to safety.
Kismet blinked in disbelief. The woman, ostensibly dedicated to bringing relief to victims of the war, had helped rescue a single individual — her own friend — before fleeing the disaster area. Shaking off his incredulity, he plunged into the ruin once more, pushing aside large chunks of the wall to reveal other victims in dust-streaked camouflage. Another section of the wall, twice as large as the piece he had helped move, had fallen inward, crushing several more unlucky souls. It seemed unlikely that anyone could have endured its massive collapse, but Kismet had witnessed survival stories far more improbable.
He was closer now to the perimeter of the terminal, and able to follow the battle raging outside on the tarmac. The infantrymen were advancing toward the position from which the grenades had been launched, filling the air with bursts of gunfire. He couldn’t tell if they were taking fire but the soldiers were staying low in order to present as small a target as possible. Kismet gave the situation a cursory glance, but kept his focus on driving wedge-shaped pieces of debris under the outermost lip of the fallen wall, forcibly raising it, if only by microscopic increments.
Abruptly, the pitch of the skirmish seemed to change. Kismet looked up from his task, anxious that yet another RPG had been unleashed. Instead of a grenade however, he saw something far more destructive racing toward his position.
In that instant he realized that the grenade attack had simply been a diversion, a feint designed to engage the troops and draw them away from the terminal. The advance had opened a gap in their flank, allowing a single vehicle to break through the outer secure perimeter of the airport, onto the tarmac. At the same instant, gunfire — Kismet recognized the distinctive report of the AK-47—from no less than three separate locations began showering the exposed soldiers, compelling them to dive for cover and effectively preventing them from firing on that lone automobile. Kismet knew instantly the purpose behind the driver’s suicidal attempt to reach the terminal and recognized just as surely that none of the men on the tarmac would be able to stop it. When that car, or rather car bomb, reached the idle jetliner, the battle would be over for everyone. The soldiers on the runway and every soul in the exposed terminal building would be caught in the ensuing firestorm.
With a deftness acquired through weeks of training — and like bicycle riding, never quite forgotten — Kismet snatched a long object from the shoulder of a fallen trooper, removed the safety pin and rolled the cylinder onto his shoulder. The AT-4 anti-tank weapon was only slightly different than the LAW 80 he had learned to use a decade earlier, and a brief glance at the instructions printed on the side of the tube was all he needed to prepare the launcher for firing. A tilt of his head brought the target into view in the peep-sight.
“Backblast clear!” He glanced quickly to his rear, checking to make sure that anyone close enough to have heard his shouted warning was hastening away from the area, then thumbed the red trigger button.
The launch tube filled with fire as the solid propellant rocket motor blasted the 80-millimeter high-explosive warhead across the tarmac. A cone-shaped inferno blossomed behind Kismet — the rocket’s backblast — and an ear-splitting hiss filled the enclosed terminal building as the missile broke the sound barrier.