It was the question he had been dreading; answering it would mean accepting some very difficult truths. “Pierre… I don’t know why, but he shut us in that lab.”
“Deliberately?”
Kismet nodded. “Maybe he didn’t know about the self-destruct, but he shut us in and made no effort to help us get out.”
“And where did he go afterward?”
“We were followed by another group. I think they might have been spies or an elite commando force. Pierre was working with them all along.” He stopped speaking as the gravity of what he was saying finally hit home. “He played me for a fool. All that talk about religious artifacts was a diversion to keep me interested, so that I would lead them to what they were really after.”
“And what was that?”
No harm in telling her. “French-made nuclear detonators.”
She let out a gasp. “There were nuclear weapons in there?”
“They weren’t armed. Pierre seemed to know all about the deal the French government made with Iraq years ago. Nuke technology for oil leases. I guess they were afraid someone would find out what they had done.”
“Did they take the detonators with them?”
It was an odd question, enough so that Kismet stopped digging. “It didn’t look like it. I think they just wanted to destroy them.”
She seemed satisfied with that. “And what of the second group? The men that killed Hussein?”
“Insurgents. I’m sure there are quite a few high-level officers who know about that place still on the loose. Maybe they were hoping to find a weapons cache or something.”
She nodded again and at that instant the sand where Kismet was digging suddenly fell away, disappearing into a newly opened funnel. There was a gleam of daylight beyond. Heartened, he jumped down into the hole and made an abrupt transition into the desert heat. Shading his eyes with a hand, he looked back to find that the gap had already been covered over with sliding sand. Part of the main rotor shaft — the blades evidently broken off during the crash — extended from the side of a massive sand dune, but that was the only sign that a helicopter had gone down in the desert. The Hind was completely buried.
“Marie!” He climbed back up the hill searching for hole. As if to answer his summons, the Frenchwoman abruptly burst from the wall in front of him and tumbled down the slope. He tried to catch her, but the uncertain terrain upon which he stood crumbled away and they both rolled to the bottom of the gully entangled like lovers. Kismet felt her shaking in his arms and thought she was crying again. It took him a moment to realize that she was laughing.
He joined her mirth for more than a minute, but when their peals of gaiety gradually stopped echoing through the dune canyons, the oppressive reality of their new peril settled in. The desert was perhaps not as hot a furnace as the one from which they had escaped in Laboratory Three, but its death sentence was no less immutable. The sun was only beginning its climb into the eastern sky, and already the temperature was soaring. To make matters worse, they were both severely dehydrated from their earlier ordeal and had no means of replenishing their bodily reserves. Kismet sat back on the simmering sand and began reviewing their options. It was a short list.
“As I see it, we have two choices. We can continued north on foot and pray that we find water before we collapse. Or we can stay here and hope that someone sends a group out to investigate our helicopter.”
“How likely is that?”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “If I were calling the shots, I’d want to know who was flying a gunship across the desert. Remember, Saddam, his sons, and most of his generals are still on the run. But that helo is hidden pretty well. They may already have flown over and not seen it. If that’s the case, then we’ll die for sure if we stay.”
Marie gazed across a landscape shimmering with convection waves. “We’ve come so far, survived so much. It cannot end like this. I say we take our chances in the wilderness.”
Her determination, however naïve, was inspirational. But the oppressive mid-morning sun quickly prompted a compromise. They would seek the shelter of the crashed helicopter until dusk, making the desert trek in the cool of evening. They spent the better part of an hour in excavating a passage back into the buried aircraft, after which Kismet began ransacking the Hind in search of anything that might improve their odds of survival. Unfortunately, the Iraqis had not provisioned the aircraft for the eventuality of a crash in the desert. There were no water cans or foodstuffs to be found, nor any extra garments or blankets to ward off exposure. A first-aid kit yielded a roll of gauze bandages and a Mylar film space blanket, but that was the extent of their supplies. Anything else would be the product of salvage and ingenuity.
There was enough fabric in the seat cushions to fashion a pair of rudimentary turbans, and after swathing one of these around his head, Kismet ventured once more into the open. Reckoning that their most immediate need was water, he began fashioning a solar still to reclaim a few precious drops of moisture out of the air. He began by digging a shallow pit, which he covered with the space blanket. The reflective film was a poor choice for what he wanted — a piece of clear plastic would have been ideal — but he had to work with what he had. Like a miniature greenhouse, the Mylar helped create a super-heated pocket of air, which in turn caused condensation to form on the inside of the blanket. A small weight tied in the center helped the dew-like droplets to run down into a receptacle, in this case the empty plastic box which had held the first-aid kit, but the yield was pitifully small. There was barely enough water after two hours to moisten their parched lips.
Aside from that, they did little else during that long day. It had been more than twenty-four hours since either of them had slept, and the trials they had faced leading up to their escape into the wasteland had left them fatigued beyond the limits of human endurance, but even rest in the oven-like confines of their shelter was exhausting. Finally, when neither of them could stand inaction any longer, they struck out across the dunes. Huddled beneath the foil-like space blanket to ward off the worst of the sun’s wrath, they commenced trekking in the waning hours of the afternoon.
No words were exchanged during that forced march — no complaints were made, nor any encouragement given. Marie had evidently found a reserve of heretofore untapped energy and kept up with Kismet without any cajoling, but that pace was barely a crawl. Not only was their speed pitiful, but to ensure that they were not wandering in circles, Kismet had to make frequent pauses to check their heading. Without a compass, or even a trustworthy wristwatch, he had to use the shadow stick method; he would place his knife upright in the sand and mark the tip of the shadow. Ten minutes later, he would check again, and a line drawn between the two gave a fairly accurate east to west reference. It was tedious and time consuming, but it was at least a guarantee that they were still moving toward their goal.
By nightfall, Kismet was reeling from the effects of dehydration. Having only just recovered from heat exhaustion, he knew that he was particularly at risk for a second bout, and this time it would undoubtedly prove fatal. As the heat of day boiled away into space following dusk, he could feel the fever raging within his flesh. Still he marched on.
Without the shadows to guide him, he looked instead to the stars. Celestial navigation at least could be performed while in motion. Their rate of progress however continued to slow. Pressed together with the Mylar blanket pulled tight around their shoulders, they moved at a shuffle, each trusting the other to stay upright. Ultimately, neither one could recall who fell first. They collapsed together, shivering against the cold and embracing like lovers, and waited for the end to come.