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.