He turned as much as he could in the seat. “Can you hear me?” he shouted to Tamara. She nodded. “We’re going down. Low on fuel.” She nodded again. “Put on the shoulder harness,” he ordered. He did the same, realizing for the first time he’d never bothered to fasten the shoulder straps. It was a bitch of a job and he grimaced with the pain of slipping his right arm through the strap. But when they hit . . . without those straps tight, their faces could go slamming hard into the panels.
The red warning light was now blinking furiously at him, and a warning buzzer sounded. There couldn’t be more than five minutes of fuel left. The west shore of the Sinai was far behind them now; that could help. They faced the prospect of walking out of the Sinai. Knock it off, he told himself. Get this thing on the ground while you can . . .
The low horizon light helped, casting long shadows. He wouldn’t slam into a gully or a rise that was being washed out by a bright overhead sun. Just like setting her down on the moon. He almost laughed aloud at the image.
He figured they were well up into the Plateau of Eltih, in the midst of the Sinai Peninsula. The deathlands of the Egyptian armies . . . remember how it went? The Israelis slashed the roads, forced them out into the open desert, the plateau, and the depressions, and left them there . . . He did some swift calculations, computing speed and time to determine distance, and as the desert moved up to meet them, they were beyond most of the Plateau of Eltih, moving into the huge depression beyond. That should put them just north, he didn’t know how far, of thirty degrees latitude. He ran the charts through his mind. Port Suez lay just below thirty degrees and . . . and they were going down into pure hell. He glanced up for a moment as the bright morning sun faded to gray and was startled to see a low, dark cloud cover obscuring the entire sky. He thought of it barely a moment, concentrated on the rugged terrain hurtling toward them. The flashing light and buzzer faded away to distant annoyances as he concentrated on what had to be done. Flaps down, try and drag her in with the last remaining dregs of fuel. He’d left the gear up—it wouldn’t do any good here; it could snap and send them hurtling over the rough desert floor at a crazy angle that would end in a shattering blast of exploding fuel vapors. Full flaps, the nose high, working the best angle of attack for the wings. Full lift, full drag, balance them out. Now he flew with his right hand on the stick—to hell with the pain; his left was on the throttle quadrant, and he knew that at any moment she would quit on them and the bottom drop out like a stone.
A wadi ahead of them. Like the dry river beds back in the Arizona desert. He knew what they were like. Seemingly smooth, but roughened up with grooves and dips. Still, it was the best they had, their only real chance, because to each side of the wadi there were grotesque formations carved from the hard desert floor. No sand here, a hard, baked surface, and that could help. He held the nose off, saw the ground rushing by through his right peripheral vision. It screwed things up but experience helped, and he tried to see through the lower side of the canopy. The nose was high, he wanted full lift and drag at the same time, playing one against the other with the power, a delicate balance of wings rocking gently. There, they should make it right over—
The power went without a sound. No rumble or vibration or anything. He felt it through his whole system, the sudden sighing away of thrust to push them, and he knew they’d had it because—
Lower than he thought. He braced himself as the flaps scraped the ground, vibrating the airplane with a thrumming sensation that went through their bodies. He had just enough time to shout to Tamara to hang on when the nose slammed down and they were on the deck, the world a blur, their bodies hammered as they shot across the desert at more than a hundred and thirty miles an hour. Instinct kept his feet slamming against the rudder pedals, but there wasn’t anything to respond. Wasted reflex motion, but he tried, and then she began to slew around. He knew pieces were tearing away but the pieces were from the flaps and the wings and the belly tanks.
A tremendous blow jarred his body. He felt helpless as he was thrown against the straps. A stinging sensation, blood. He realized he had bitten the inside of his cheek. The noise crashed against them, a crescendo of tearing metal. A sharp lurch came, and quiet. Shocking quiet. His ears rang, and Tamara flashed into his mind. He jerked the canopy release and the strut extended, lifting the plexiglas shell, bringing in the sounds of metal cooling and the smell of oil and kerosene mixing with sand.
“Tamara!” He struggled to release himself from his harness. Those crackling sounds . . . they could be only metal or they might be the first warning sounds of fire. He heard her call his name. He was free, climbing from the seat, standing on the wing. She had a bloody right cheek but that was all. She was simply stunned by the crash landing. He loosened her harness, half lifted and dragged her from the fighter to the wing, then to the ground. He forgot the pain in his arm as he lifted her and stumbled away from the wreck. A hundred yards off, on the other side of a rock outcropping, he lowered her to the ground, studying her face.
“How do you feel?” He didn’t know the strain showing on his face.
“I’ll . . . be fine in a moment,” she said quietly. “As soon as I get my breath back.” She breathed deeply several times, closing her eyes. When she opened them she smiled. “I’m fine, really, Steve.” She reached out to his right arm. “It looks like it’s stopped bleeding. I thought it was broken.”
He shook his head. “Flesh wound, I guess.”
He stood up and looked around, helping her to her feet. “Where are we?” she asked.
Around them stretched desolation. Despite its desert conditions, much of the Sinai, like most deserts, was formed by the channeling of water. The surface was a wild mixture of sand, rock, and gravel, baked claylike material, all of it convoluted along hillocks and depressions. “The best I can make out,” he said, “we’re slightly north of Suez. Maybe sixty miles to the east.”
She nodded slowly, thinking. “If we continue straight east, the Israeli border is perhaps seventy miles from here.”
“That’s straight-line distance. You can add ten to thirty miles for moving around this stuff. And that’s if we move straight, which I don’t think is too likely.”
She looked around them, spoke slowly and carefully. “This is dangerous country. We will never be able to walk out of here to safety. As you say, it means walking a distance of perhaps a hundred true miles. In this desert we would never make it.”
“Those clouds will help,” he said.
“You didn’t let me finish. You could make it. With . . . with your legs, you could make it before your body became dehydrated.”
He didn’t answer for a moment, but he’d gotten her message. “Are you suggesting I just take off, leaving you, and try to save myself.”
She looked down at the ground and nodded. “What we went for is more important.”
“Are you crazy?” He pointed to the MiG. “Look at that twisted hunk of metal. We went to get an airplane and bring it back to Israel. Well, we didn’t,” he said, “because somebody had better aim than they deserved and because I never had a chance to find out enough about the plane to know if it had other capacities even on reduced fuel to get us home. We sure used up the juice—even the belly tank.”
She turned to her left, studying the surface. “Is that the tank?”
“Yeah,” he said with a sour tone.
“Strange.”
“What’s strange?”
“Would a fuel tank have fins at the end?”
He shrugged. “Some of them do. Stabilization, that sort of thing.”
She started walking. “Let’s take a closer look at that tank.”
“What the hell’s the matter with—?” He hurried to catch up with her. “We’re wasting time, Tamara,” he said as he walked beside her. “We—”
His voice fell away as they neared the tank. It had been torn loose from the MiG in the landing and sent hurtling over the desert floor, breaking up before it came to a stop. He be
nt down, examining the inner mechanism. He looked up at her. “It’s not a fuel tank,” he said. She waited. He moved about, examining more material. “It’s an atom bomb. A big one.”
“We thought so,” she whispered. “Major Chuen, our intelligence people, we thought the Russians might be doing this. Moving these . . . these things into Afsir.”
He rose to his feet. “Well, no more questions about it. That,” he pointed, “is at least a one megaton warhead. It didn’t go off because we didn’t set the release mechanisms.”
“You’ve got to get back with this information.”
“We’ve got to get back,” he amended. “Well, first things first. Move back a bit, will you?” She watched in fascination as he found the release beneath the plastiskin near the outer rim of the eye socket. He pressed in, felt it click into position. He judged the sun angle for the best light, and moved slowly around the remains of the MiG, blinking the eye muscles for the pictures. He took a dozen shots of the wrecked bomb, went back to the MiG-27, shot pictures of the bomb shackles, aircraft numbers, cockpit interior, and three exteriors of the machine from different angles.
“The camera is in the left eye,” he told her. “If anything happens to me, remember that.”
“What are you saying?”
“For God’s sake, Tamara, if I’m dead I won’t feel a thing. It’s a ceramic. You know, plastic. You’ll have to twist a bit to tear the muscle connections at the back of the eyeball, but—”
“Stop it!”
He was tired, irritated, touchy from the pain in his right arm. Maybe he was being sadistically graphic. Still, she had to know . . . “Look, you’re the one who’s always telling me how much blood and gore you’re used to, goddammit, so why should one stinking plastic eye bother you so much?”
When finally she had back her control, her voice was a whip. “You are not only unfeeling,” she said, “you are also stupid.”
She turned and stalked off to the wreckage, climbing into the bent wing to regain entry to the cockpit. He ran after her. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
She looked back over her shoulder. “You are supposed to have a fine brain. Use it. We can’t stay here forever. They’ll be tracking down this machine. I saw a first-aid kit back there. We’ll need it.”
She was right, and instinctively his eye went to the sky above them. The clouds were thicker, sweeping across the heavens, and he could smell the winds already lifting dust and sand. She glanced at him. “Don’t count on rain,” she told him. “All we’ll get is wind.”
“It wasn’t the rain I was thinking of,” he said. “No sun or stars if this keeps up.” He shrugged. “Well, we’ve got a compass, anyway.”
“Get in here, please. We must be on our way soon.”
The first-aid kit was all they found. Steve had hoped the fighter would contain at least one survival kit in the seats, but apparently the Russians used the seat-pack arrangement, with the kit attached to the parachute. And there weren’t any chutes, either, which meant no canopy for sun protection if they had to travel for several days. As he searched the wreckage the wind moaned louder around the torn edges of metal. “Steve! We can’t wait any longer.”
He nodded reluctantly, climbed down, then looked up again. “In this stuff we’ll be out of sight in no time at all. We can—”
“Listen!”
He froze, but only for a moment. He grabbed her by the wrist and ran from the MiG, half dragging her behind him. He didn’t need to listen any longer. He knew the sound of helicopter turbines. They had taken this long because of the weather. The fast turbine choppers could stay low. The MiG probably had an automatic crash locator beacon. Anyway, they were there. But they were passing over. They had missed their target. Of course; the sand billowing all about them. They’d find the MiG, no two ways about that. When they did, in a few more minutes, they’d be in there like sharks. In a few minutes the wind would obliterate their tracks. If he could slow down that chopper . . .
“Tamara, stay here,” he said quickly.
Her hand grasped his wrist. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
“No time now. Just wait here for me, and be ready to move out fast.”
He pulled free and became no more than a wraith in the blowing sand. Visibility was terrible, but that was to his advantage. He heard the turbine chopper overhead, following a grid search pattern. He dropped to the ground, waited until the sound diminished, then was on his feet and running to the wrecked MiG. He ducked under a wing, pulled up his left sleeve. The plastiskin plug he had started to release before, back in the Afsir camp. He reached in with two fingers of his right hand, withdrew a plastic cylinder, twisted it open. Two containers fell into his hand. He tried to remember the time exactly; six seconds, no more. He tried to listen above the wind for the Russian helicopter. Still seemed far enough away. There was a fuel tank cap recessed into the top of the left wing. He climbed the wing, pried open the cap, held one of the containers over the fuel tank opening, twisted it suddenly and released it. In the same moment he hurled himself from the wing and ran from the MiG, his legs pistoning against the ground. He was ten yards away when a sudden glare washed over him. Twenty yards off when the small flare bomb he’d dropped into the tank exploded the trapped kerosene vapors.
An explosion shattered the MiG as he dropped to the desert floor, hugging the ground. Chunks of metal went over his head. He waited a few more seconds and was up again, running to where Tamara waited.
“Let’s go,” he shouted, taking hold of her wrist and running again into the thickening sand. Behind them flames stabbed through the billows of windblown sand.
“You’re crazy!” Tamara shouted. “They’re certain to find it now!”
“Save your breath. Sure they’ll find it. They’ll have just enough time to know the ship blew up. They won’t have enough time to see if we survived it. Not in this wind. They’ll take a fast look and be on their way home as fast as they can go. Without ever knowing we made it safely out of that thing.”
I hope, he thought as they ran.
CHAPTER 25
Tamara demanded that they stop after two hours of plodding through the increasing wind.
She had been walking close behind Steve, using his body as a buffer against the ceaseless howl of driving wind and sand. Still, the protection he provided was minimal. The air drove across the desert not with a steady flow, but a swirl, capricious in its pattern, remorseless in its strength. One moment she might feel relief from the wind, but this was only because of the changing direction of air. The next instant the wind curled around Steve’s moving form, the pattern of air visible in the finer sand, driven so that when it slammed, scorching hot and raspy, it seemed to strike her with doubled fury. She stumbled now against his back, her hands clutching at his clothing to keep herself upright. Steve turned, his back to the wind, as Tamara buried her face hard against his chest.
“This is stupid,” she told him, her voice muffled through the cloth bands torn from their shirts and knotted across their faces. “We’re making hardly any distance at all. I don’t think we’ve come more than three or four miles.” She put her arms about him. “Steve, we must rest. This is madness. The wind, the heat . . . we’ll wear ourselves out before we’ve hardly started.”
He nodded, hating to agree with her. No question but that she was right. He had removed one of his uniform buttons, unscrewed the false cap, and had been guiding them through the howling wind by the compass, trying to move steadily to the east. He knew they had wasted many steps. No way to avoid it. The wind howled steadily, not a full-blown storm, but enough to rake them with its enervating heat and sand that was already deposited throughout their bodies. As much as he remembered from his survival schools he was still no match for Tamara’s hard experience in the desert. She used the knife from one of her boots to cut their shirt bottoms into makeshift but excellent face masks that kept sand from clogging their nostrils and getting into their mouths. But their eyes we
re taking a beating, and she was right about the wind. It dried them out with appalling swiftness, and he thought more and more about what lay ahead of them. No wonder Tamara had brought up the subject of his leaving her to go on by himself. No false heroics there. She spoke as an Israeli soldier, a damn good one. His film had information vital to her country. It had to get back so that critical diplomatic—and possibly military—action could be taken before the Arab-Russian coalition could pull off at least a gigantic piece of blackmail. Those nuclear bombs and secret weapon emplacements in Afsir might well win for the Arabs what their Russian-supplied military efforts were impotent to do—the territory lost in the Six Day War and, ultimately, the destruction of Israel itself.
He’d thought about that as they plodded along, picking their way carefully, faces down, Tamara staying as close behind his body as she could without impeding his own progress. Once this damned wind fell off, and Tamara thought it might die down by late afternoon, he knew he could start out with a steady running pace that would eat up the miles. Much faster than she could move. Okay, Tamara was right by her lights. Not by his. He’d risk his life, had been doing just that, but for his own country, for the mission, for the damned challenge it provided him because of what he’d become and what he was. Something else, too: Call it quixotic, old-fashioned, whatever, he simply could not deliberately abandon Tamara to this hellish country. Put another way, her survival was more important than the rest of the mission. More important, he was astonished to realize, than his own. He doubted Mr. McKay would approve of such an unprofessional scale of priorities, and he was ever surer the Israeli high command would censor him, but they were there and he was here, and that was that. Maybe it was the cyborg over-compensating to be human. The hell with it, he’d listen to no more from her—or himself—about it.
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