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?”