by Brian Hodge
Suddenly the dragonfly on the near side of the crater lifted smoothly from the sand and in one clean motion brought a rifle—a Kalashnikov—into line with them. The sound was lost in the hammering beat of the Sikorsky, but the muzzle flashes were vivid and succinct. And by the time the other two figures on the ground had sprung up, each with his own Kalashnikov, they heard the pings off the rotor and felt the lurch. The chopper yawed violently and began to spin.
Instinctively Kenyon's palms and fingers melded with the two controls. His left hand twisted the grip, feeding fuel while he moved that stick to change the pitch of the blades. Simultaneously he used the right control so that the rotor swept them forward. The copter righted itself. But the ground fire was murderously close. If he banked away, he would make a broader target. Without hesitation, Kenyon turned head-on and dove for the figures on the ground.
It was a game of chicken. For the figures on the ground the terms were stand and fire versus fall and be saved. But all three stood, apparently willing to die if only they could bring down the chopper. Their gray robes billowed in the wash and the blinding swirls of sand, and still they fired. In the sudden maelstrom it would certainly have taken luck to hit anything. Add to that disorientation the deafening resonance and tattooing of mechanical things. But as low as the Sikorsky swept and as near to the target as the blinded shooters were, no heads rolled and nothing penetrated the skin of the craft. The assailants turned to follow the sound, still firing wildly and perhaps in danger of hitting each other.
Kenyon glanced across at his passenger and was struck by the grim stoicism on the geologist's pug features. Tough little man. Where had he fought before? They flew straight north, looking back at the curious spot of red already fading to orange and at the figures blending with the sand. The smell of gas was in the cabin, but the gauge was holding steady. Banking in a wide circle, Kenyon headed back toward Basra.
Despite relief, it nagged at Kenyon’s logic that the ground fire had been so inept. The only hits were those "pings" that had come at maximum distance after the firing began. Why hadn't their accuracy improved just before the ground wash enveloped them? He had flown at them to make them duck, but failing that, they couldn't have missed. Unless they wanted to. Was it because they didn't want him to crash in the red crater? He had a feeling that bringing a helicopter down in the desert would not have been a problem for them—that more of them would have come to remove anything that compromised the site. These were not worshippers—at least not just worshippers—they must have been guards. They would have hauled off the wreckage like ants carrying away leaves, like carrion eaters picking bones. And yet they wouldn't risk having him crash in the red crater. What could be so valuable there? And who the hell were the defenders?
Servants of the Circle, Red Sentries, Keepers of Silence, Defenders of the Cradle of Dust—these were some of the names Kenyon had never heard of that trailed back fifty centuries into the dawn of social order. Dozens of sects back through Mesopotamia and Babylon had sustained the watch. Some had done so out of fear, some out of love, others merely because of tradition, some simply because of the magnitude of a sacred trust. All had felt awe.
In the time of the Ottoman Empire there had been outposts in a ring around the crater, and so far removed from it that only a camel could cross from an outpost to the site in a day. But the ring itself had drawn attention, and eventually a traitor and a massacre had caused the strategy to be changed. Now only a trio of servitors stood guard. Three members at a time out of the fifteen permanent initiates. They came on foot at night across the moon-haunted desert, so that no horse droppings marked the way. The first seven of the nineteen kilometers were trekked through a brook; the last twelve along various routes in the shadows of sarsens or where the wind would sweep away traces. They stayed at the red crater for twenty-four hours, until the next sentries arrived. No outsider knew of the site. No outsider could know. The fifteen faithful were celibate, and they would turn ruthlessly on each other if any weakening was suspected.
They were supported by the elders at the ruins known as Tel el Muhunnad, but only two patriarchs of that small, impenetrable sect actually understood exactly what it was they were guarding. The power in the crater was enormous, staggering, and yet it was a mere residue, beyond the province of man to harness and blasphemous to try. Not gold, not silver, nor precious stones. There was nothing of value here in the commerce of civilization. Nothing at all … except red dust.
"You will come upon your destiny like a falcon diving on its prey."
So Kenyon had. A robust, manly destiny befitting the hunter in him. The tangible goal of riches; the intangible one of revenge against those who had shot at him. But it wasn't just anger or even greed that drew him back. He needed something to pull his life together and stop the slide. It came out less philosophically when he made his pitch.
"There's something extremely valuable at that site," he told each of the five men he recruited. "Something they don't want to move."
This played well in the impoverished harshness of the marshlands for the man named Dakhil. The superstitious Ma'di had always believed in the Hujaidk, a magical island guarded by spirits who could make it invisible and drive visitors mad, and thus the island of red sand and its nearly invisible guardians struck a chord of religious destiny in the breast of stalwart Dakhil.
And Saladin, the Kurd who ran routes with Kenyon from Mosul to Kirkuk, also found it attractive. His Yazidi sect believed in the ultimate power of God but deferred in the short term to Shaitan—the fallen angel Satan—who after all was in control of the present earth. You could take God's goodness for granted, Saladin had once explained, but Malak Ta'us (the Peacock Angel, symbol of Satan) was unpredictable and required appeasement. If the guardians of this red crater were holding the earth hostage, then maybe there was justice in destroying them. Saladin reasoned this with mounting fervor, but it was Kenyon's speculation about something valuable that made his eyes glint.
Sadam Salah, from Baghdad's famed River Street row of silversmiths, needed no spiritual justification. Apprenticed to his uncle and feeling trapped in a family craft that smothered his young ambitions, he had always responded favorably to Kenyon's propositions. Either money or adventure alone would have persuaded him. The prospect of both was extravagant.
A Ma'di from the south, a Kurd from the north, a Shiite Muslim from Baghdad. Truly strange bedfellows. Kenyon had never worked with all of them together before, nor had his partner, Bailey Burke, a veteran pilot who had flown Shawnees and Chickasaws for the Air Force.
Bailey had reservations. "These guys know who the enemy is?" he grumbled. That was unusual for Bailey, who never seemed to worry about anything. If Kenyon was forever glancing at his watch, Bailey didn't wear one.
And then there was Demetrius Booth—always a surprise. The Greek geologist kept everyone at arm's length with his bad breath and Coke-bottle lenses, but he had responded to Kenyon's request that he help them assay what might be there in the red crater by insisting that he wanted to go along for the kill. It provoked an argument between the two partners that was settled only when Demetrius offered to pay for the Kalashnikovs that Saladin was to obtain.
"Do you know how to use an automatic rifle?" Bailey demanded of Booth.
"With my eyesight, anything that keeps pumping out bullets is the weapon of choice," the Greek said, and if that wasn't a satisfying answer, the wad of dinars he pulled out of his pocket was.
It took six days to put it together—the repairs to the rotor, the travel, the bringing of arms through border passes in extreme southeast Turkey near Semdini. Six days. Long enough to create a universe. And though God may have rested the next day, on their seventh morning the little sortie group went in under an ancient sky without a clue as to what they were disturbing.
As an attack, there was no real element of surprise. The strategy was six against three. Kenyon made a low circle, keeping almost half a mile from ground zero, dropping off Dakhil, Booth, Sa
lah and Burke ninety degrees apart from each other. Then, with the four on the ground closing in and drawing fire, he attacked from the air, roaring nose-on toward the red crater while Saladin hung out of the retrofitted port on the Sikorsky, firing his Kalashnikov.
It was Salah who went down first, catching a burst in the throat and chest less than fifty yards from the object of their assault. The defenders were skilled, and they had built a ring of redoubts around the crater whose slight elevation was undetectable from the air. Brom the positions they took to fire outward, Kenyon could see this now. And he understood too that the redoubts had been built because the defenders would not step down into the crater in order to use the rim for protection. Had he been a man of faith, he might have imputed this to some religious cause. It was easier to believe that something of secular value lay in the crater. Or even that the red dust was dangerous. At any rate, it was too late to second-guess. Now it was a fight for survival as much as spoils. Reason enough to live for a soldier of fortune; reason enough to die for a man who had been dying for a decade.
Boldly he swept over the crater, gambling that they wouldn't shoot down his chopper as long as it hovered over the red dust. With Saladin firing on the pinned defenders, Kenyon moved the stick in his left hand, dropping, dropping. They were perhaps sixty feet in the air—that in-between altitude he hated. If he could get it under thirty feet, he would feel safer. And his gamble was working. The robed figures writhed below him, torn between getting off bursts at the ground attackers and shooting up at the vulnerable target that was descending on them like a falcon diving on its prey. Fifty-five feet … fifty. It happened faster than the telling. But now the wash began to kick things up. Swirls of dust, swirls of time, men coming apart as they came together, passion and will apart from God, blind, forever blind …
The Servants of the Circle squinted within the pillar of red, trying to determine whether the blasphemous machine was yawing and pitching itself clear of the holy site. Did it even matter, when they would momentarily be dead anyway? Who would protect the Circle then? Better to bring it down if there was a chance that they might keep control of the site. One of them sat up, his left arm raised against the dust, his right cradling the Kalashnikov. In an instant he was raked by Dakhil's deadly fire. Immediately a second defender rose to his feet, firing blindly into the demonic roar.
The Sikorsky was above forty feet when the engine cut out. Too low for autorotation to save it; too high for ground cushion to have an effect. It fell like a stone in the middle of the crater and exploded into flame. The blast threw bodies and riving shards of metal in a broad circle. The heat kept everyone at bay. One of the defenders was still alive, his robes afire, his kaffiyeh missing, clawing for a great curved knife in his sash. It frightened Dakhil, who nevertheless edged forward the final few steps. "… Hujaidk," he murmured and fired conclusively.
Burke, Booth, Dakhil. Everyone else was dead. In astonishment the survivors watched the remnants of the Sikorsky burn. The fire was intensely red, almost phosphorescent, the heat ferocious. And it didn't just eat away consumables, leaving blackened scoria and ashes. It hissed and vaporized like a fuse. Strangest of all, there was no smoke. There should have been billowing black clouds going up, but there was absolutely nothing, as if matter were not just transmuting to energy but being annihilated. In a few minutes the red crater lay as before, with only a glassy patch marking the spot where the chopper had exploded on impact and burned.
It was Demetrius Booth, the geologist, who stepped down into the crater and walked carefully to the spot.
His Coke-bottle lenses were riveted on the glazed sand. Slowly he squatted, extending an index finger until it punctured the translucent crust.
"What is it?" Bailey hollered at length from the rim.
Booth stood up. "Natron …" he murmured, then more loudly: "Sand. . . just sand!"
They probed, they dug, they searched. Sand. An extremely fine red sand. An anomaly, to be sure. The Sahara was sand, and the Gobi was like the valley of the moon, but the Iraqi desert was inclined to barren wasteland with shale and tufted vegetation. They found the guards' meager rations nearby. Water, some nuts. Emptying one of the jugs, they filled it with red sand and began the long trek toward the marshes.
It was two days before they were back in Basra, two days of walking and Ma'dan hospitality and clouds of mosquitoes in the marshlands. Booth confirmed his analysis soon after: a fine red sand you could call dust, not typical of any formations in the area.
"So why is it valuable?" Bailey wanted to know.
"I haven't the faintest idea. These people will attach legends to any anomaly. Maybe a meteor crashed there. That circular crater …"
Demetrius Booth had lost whatever interest he had in this madcap diversion. His second night back in Basra, he checked out of the Saint George and disappeared into the global mists from which he had come. Dakhil also left, shrugging and quietly returning to his archipelago village built of reeds. Life was a struggle; he did not have the luxury of guilt, grief or regret.
Bailey did. He was angry at first, his blood still singing with the violence of the raid. He was angry at the strangers he had assaulted. Angry at Kenyon for getting killed. Angry because he could not understand what had happened. But then the futility and stupidity of what they had done sank in, and he began to feel humility and remorse. Clay Kenyon had a married daughter by his first wife in the States. He had one of her letters in his pocket, which he had neglected to give his partner before the raid. At least he would write her to say that her father had died in a helicopter crash. Then he would get out of Iraq. Go to Europe. Look up an old girlfriend who would drink with him and hear his confessions for a while.
Booth had transferred the red dust to a plastic bag, and Bailey would have thrown it into the Shatt al Arab, except that on the third night in Basra, while he was staying in the Greek's paid-up room, someone broke in and tried to steal it.
In through the balcony came the thief, a slight man dressed oddly for his mission in a double-breasted British suit coat, white native trousers and a kaffiyeh on his head. Bailey, stocky and with a grip like spring steel, got him by the throat as he was escaping.
"I get real testy when someone wakes me," he growled, bending him over the rail four stories up. "So tell me a bedtime story so I can get back to sleep."
He got a thin wheeze of Arabic.
"No English? Too bad." He tipped the body a little more.
"Wait!" The agile man clung as Bailey rocked him back to the pivot point.
"Ah, I thought you might become a linguist."
"You stole it," the thief piped recklessly.
"Yeah, that's true."
"I am not stealing it. I am getting it back."
"We won't dispute that. Now, tell me exactly what it is I've stolen."
There was a moment of calculation while the intruder registered Bailey's ignorance.
"You were guarding it, Bucko,” Bailey prompted. “It must be valuable."
"It is not valuable."
"Don't tell me … a holy site?"
"No, no, not holy." Lameness in the voice.
"A holy site," Bailey repeated with disgust. This was what Kenyon had died for.
"I swear, it is not."
Bailey teetered him over the rail.
"I will tell you! I will tell you!" He was breathless now, fumbling for a train of thought that Bailey kept shaking him to derail. "It … it is the dust of …"
"Spit it out."
"—of Creation." This came out a half sob—agony and fear—and as the intruder was swung back onto his own center of gravity, he trembled like an abject puppy let back in from the storm but facing the shame for which it had been banished.
"Creation," Bailey sighed, his arms relaxing like depressurized pistons. "Adam and Eve. If you people found a snowman, you'd think it was the Holy Ghost."
But if for Bailey the drama had all gone out of the mystery of the red dust, his reprieved visitor was now int
ent on denying what he had just blurted out for the sake of his own skin.
"I did not say it was holy. There is a legend … a legend of a master race … coming from the stars. They made us. They made men and left the red residue."
"Like I said, religion."
"I'm telling you, it has nothing to do with religion. Scoff at what I've told you, if you like, but do not spread rumors that could cause a sensation."
The fellow was frantic with smoke screens.
Bailey pulled him all the way up. "What are you—a priest? You're not like those fighters out in the desert. Here." He retrieved the plastic bag of red dust that had been dropped on the balcony. "Take it. Save me the trouble of throwing it away. Take a 'powder.' Am-scray. But use the door this time."
Thunderstruck, the little man in the double-breasted suit and loose native trousers moved a couple of cautious steps. Then, gathering the bag to his breast with both hands, he fled through the apartment as comically as a broken-field runner.
And that would have been the end of it, but in the morning Bailey saw the rest of the red dust, which Demetrius Booth had poured into a glass flask for analysis, and decided that it would serve as ashes in a funerary urn. So he wrote Kenyon's daughter that her father's ashes were enclosed—a little white lie to give her some closure for her father, and himself some closure for his partner—and by noon he had packed the thing in a wooden box filled with excelsior and shipped it to America. Now he could get on with his life. By nightfall he was floating in the Shatt al Arab with his throat slashed from ear to ear.
