by Paul Sussman
‘What?’ asked the navigator.
Reiter just nodded ahead, to where what looked like a vast mountain had suddenly loomed in the distance, directly across their flight path – a dense, bulging mass of shadow rearing from the desert floor high into the sky and stretching from horizon to horizon. Although it was hard to be sure, it seemed to be moving, drifting towards them.
‘What is that?’ asked the navigator. ‘Mist?’
Reiter said nothing, just watched through narrowed eyes as the darkness came steadily closer.
‘Sandstorm,’ he said eventually.
‘God Almighty,’ whistled the co-pilot. ‘Look at it.’
Reiter grasped the handles of the control column and started to ease it back.
‘We need to get higher.’
They climbed to 5,500 metres, then 6,000 as the storm advanced inexorably in their direction, devouring the ground, blotting it out.
‘Fuck, it’s moving fast,’ said Reiter.
They climbed higher, right up to their service ceiling, almost 7,000 metres. The wall of shadow was now close enough for them to make out its contours, great folds and billows of dust creasing around and into each other, tumbling silently across the landscape. The plane started to bump and tremble.
‘I don’t think we’re going to get above it,’ said the copilot.
The bumping became more pronounced, a faint hissing sound percolating into the cockpit as grains of sand and other debris started to impact on the windows and fuselage.
‘If any of that gets in the engines …’
‘… we’re screwed,’ muttered Reiter, finishing the copilot’s sentence. ‘We’ll have to backtrack and try to go round it.’
The storm seemed to be gathering speed. As if aware of their intentions and anxious to catch them before they could turn, its face surged forward like a tidal wave, eating up the intervening distance. Reiter started to bank the plane to port, beads of sweat glistening on his forehead.
‘If we can just get her round we should be—’
He was cut short by a loud bang, outside, to starboard. The plane yawed sharply in the same direction and started to roll, its nose dropping, the master caution indicators bursting into life like the lights on a Christmas tree.
‘Oh Christ!’ cried the navigator. ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’
Reiter was fighting to stabilize the aircraft as their dive steepened, the cockpit turning almost 40 degrees on its side. Equipment tumbled out of the locker behind them, the discarded vodka bottle span across the floor and smashed against the starboard bulkhead.
‘Fire starboard engine,’ yelled the co-pilot, throwing a backward glance out of the window. ‘A lot of fucking fire, Kurt!’
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ hissed Reiter.
‘Fuel pressure dropping. Oil pressure dropping. Altitude six thousand five hundred and dropping. Turn-and-slip – Christ, it’s all over the place!’
‘Shut it down and hit the fire bottle!’ shouted Reiter. ‘Jerry, I need to know where we are. Fast.’
While the navigator scrambled to locate their position and the co-pilot furiously flicked switches, Reiter continued to battle the controls, the plane losing height all the time, spiralling downward in a series of broad circles, the storm coming ever closer, looming in and out of the cockpit window like a towering cliff face.
‘Six thousand metres,’ cried the co-pilot. ‘Five thousand seven hundred … six hundred … five hundred. You’ve got to get the nose up and turn us, Kurt!’
‘Tell me something I don’t already fucking know!’ There was an edge of panic in his voice. ‘Jerry?’
‘Twenty-three degrees 30 minutes north,’ called the navigator. ‘Twenty-five degrees 18 minutes east.’
‘Where’s the nearest airfield?’
‘What the hell are you talking about? We’re in the middle of the fucking Sahara! There aren’t any airfields! Dakhla’s three hundred and fifty kilometres, Kufra’s—’
The cabin door flew open and the suited Egyptian staggered into the cockpit, grasping at the navigator’s seat to steady himself as the plane bucked and rolled.
‘What is happening?’ he cried. ‘Tell me what is happening!’
‘Christ Al-fucking-mighty!’ roared Reiter. ‘Get back to your seat, you mad—’
He got no further because at that moment the storm lunged forward and enveloped them, flinging the Antonov up and then down as though it were made of balsa. The Egyptian was pitched face forward against the armrest of Reiter’s seat, slicing his head open; the port engine sputtered, coughed and died.
‘Get out a Mayday,’ cried Reiter.
‘No!’ coughed the Egyptian, pawing at his shredded scalp. ‘Radio silence. We agreed there would be—’
‘Call it, Rudi!’
The co-pilot had already flicked on the radio.
‘Mayday, Mayday. Victor Papa Charlie Mike Tango four seven three. Mayday, Mayday. Both engines out. Repeat, both engines out. Position …’
The navigator repeated their GPS co-ordinates and the co-pilot relayed them into his microphone, sending the message over and over as Reiter wrestled with the controls. With no power and the storm buffeting them from all sides it was a hopeless battle and they continued to plummet, the altimeter’s needle spinning relentlessly anticlockwise, its gauge clicking downwards past 5,000 metres, then 4,000, 3,000, 2,000. Outside the howling of the wind grew louder, the turbulence ever more violent as they plunged into the heart of the maelstrom.
‘We’re going down!’ cried Reiter as they dipped below 1,500 metres. ‘Get Omar secure.’
The navigator dropped the folding chair on the back of the co-pilot’s seat and heaved their blood-soaked passenger onto it, strapping him in before lurching back to his own seat.
‘Estana!’ the Egyptian called weakly to his companion in the cabin. ‘Ehna hanoaa! Echahd!’
They were now under 1,000 metres. Reiter dropped the landing flaps and activated the wing spoilers in a desperate bid to reduce their speed.
‘Undercarriage?’ shouted the co-pilot, his voice all but drowned out by the raging of the wind and the clatter of debris against the plane’s fuselage.
‘Can’t risk it!’ yelled Reiter. ‘If it’s rocky down there it’ll flip us over.’
‘Chances?’
‘Somewhere south of nil.’
He continued to pull on the control column, a chant of ‘Allah-u-Akhbar!’ echoing from the cabin behind, the copilot and navigator watching in horrified fascination as the altimeter whirred its way downwards through the last few hundred metres.
‘If we get out of this you make sure you share those photos, Rudi!’ cried Reiter at the very last moment. ‘You hear! I want to see that woman’s tits and arse!’
The altimeter hit zero. Reiter gave the control yoke a final yank, the nose by some miracle responding and coming up so that although they hit the ground at almost 400 km/hour, they at least did so level. There was a ferocious, bone-shattering thud: the impact ripped the Egyptian out of his seat and smashed him first into the ceiling of the cockpit and then against its rear wall, his neck snapping like a twig. They bounced, came down again, the cockpit lights cut out and the port window exploded inwards, shearing off half of Reiter’s face like a scalpel. His hysterical screams were all but obliterated by the raging of the storm, a suffocating cloud of sand and debris pouring in through the opening where the window had been.
For 1,000 metres they careered across flat terrain, bucking and jolting but just about keeping a straight line. Then the plane’s nose glanced against some unseen obstruction and they went into a spin, the 14-tonne Antonov whirling around like a leaf in a breeze. A fire extinguisher tore itself from its holder and cannoned into the navigator’s ribs, shattering them as though they were made of china; the door of the wall locker flew from its hinges and crunched into the back of Reiter’s head, pulping it. Round and round they went, all sense of speed and direction lost in the choking murk of the cockpit, everything kaleidoscop
ing into a single chaotic blur. After what seemed like an age but must have been only seconds, they started to slow, the plane’s revolutions slackening as the desert’s surface grasped at the underside and finally brought the plane to a halt, leaning backwards at a precarious angle as though on the edge of a sharp slope, the nose pointing upwards.
For a moment everything was still, the sandstorm continuing to hammer against the fuselage and windows, the acrid stench of super-heated metal suffusing the cockpit; then, groggily, the co-pilot shifted in his seat.
‘Kurt?’ he called. ‘Jerry?’
No response. He reached out, fingers touching something warm and wet, then started to unbuckle himself. As he did so he felt the plane tilt. He stopped, waited, then continued to fumble, throwing off his harness and levering himself out of his seat. Another tilt, the plane’s nose see-sawing up and then down. The co-pilot froze, trying to sense what was happening, peering into the blackness. Again the plane pivoted before, with a groan and a creak, its nose started to rise and this time kept on going, rearing almost vertical as the Antonov started to slide backwards. It snagged on something, stopped, started sliding again and then it was plummeting tail-first through open space. The sandstorm disappeared and the windows suddenly cleared to reveal tangled glimpses of shadowy rock walls to either side, as though they were falling into a gorge of some sort. The plane bounced and cartwheeled downwards until with a deafening crunch it slammed belly-first into a dense mass of trees. For several moments the only sounds were the crack and hiss of tortured metal. Then, gradually, other noises started to fade in: a rustle of leaves, a distant tinkle of water and, soft at first but growing steadily louder until it filled the night, the startled twittering of birds.
‘Kurt?’ groaned a voice from inside the wreckage. ‘Jerry?’
WASHINGTON. THE PENTAGON BUILDING. THE SAME EVENING
‘Thank you all for coming. I apologize for bringing you here at such short notice, but something has … cropped up.’
The speaker drew heavily on his cigarette, wafting a hand to dispel the smoke and gazing intently at the seven men and one woman gathered round the table in front of him. The suite was windowless, sparsely furnished, nondescript, the same as hundreds of other offices within the cramped catacomb of the Pentagon, its sole distinguishing feature a large map of Africa and the Middle East covering most of one wall. That and the fact that the only lighting came from a battered Anglepoise lamp sitting on the floor at the foot of the map, so that while the map itself was illuminated everything else in the room, including those in it, was sunk in deep shadow.
‘Forty minutes ago,’ the speaker continued, his voice low, throaty, ‘one of our stations picked up a radio message from over the Sahara.’
He reached into his pocket and produced a hand-held laser pointer, directing its eye towards the map. A jerky red dot appeared in the middle of the Mediterranean.
‘It was sent from about here.’
The dot slid down the map, coming to rest in the southwest corner of Egypt, close to the intersection of the borders with Libya and Sudan, over the words Hadabat al Jilf al Kabir (The Gilf Kebir Plateau).
‘The message came from a plane. A Cayman-registered Antonov, call sign VP-CMT 473.’
A pause, then:
‘It was a Mayday.’
There was an uneasy shifting in chairs, a muttered ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘What do we know?’ asked one of the listeners, a burly man with a balding head.
The speaker sucked out the last of his cigarette and drilled the stub into an ashtray on the table.
‘At this stage not much,’ he replied. ‘I’ll give you what we’ve got.’
He talked for five minutes, tracing lines across the map with his pointer – Albania, Benghazi, back to the Gilf Kebir – occasionally referring to a sheaf of papers scattered in front of him. He lit another cigarette, and then another, chain-smoking, the atmosphere in the room growing steadily thicker and more acrid. When he finished everyone started speaking at once, their voices merging into a confused cacophony from which certain words and half-sentences leapt out – ‘Knew it was crazy!’ ‘Saddam!’ ‘World War Three!’ ‘Iran-Contra’, ‘Fucking catastrophe’, ‘Gift to Khomeini’ – but from which no overall sense could be made.
Only the woman remained silent, tapping her pen thoughtfully on the tabletop before rising to her feet, walking over to the map and gazing up at it. Her body cast a slim silhouette, her bobbed blond hair glowing in the lamplight.
‘We’ll just have to find it,’ she said.
Although her voice was soft, barely audible amidst the hubbub of male argument and counter-argument, there was an underlying strength to it, an air of authority that commanded attention. The other speakers quietened down until the room was silent.
‘We’ll just have to find it,’ she repeated. ‘Before anyone else does. I’m assuming the Mayday went out on an open frequency?’
The speaker acknowledged that it had.
‘Then we should get to work.’
‘And how exactly do you propose we do that?’ asked the burly, balding man. ‘Phone Mubarak? Put an ad in the paper?’
His tone was sarcastic, confrontational. The woman didn’t rise to it.
‘We adapt, we improvise,’ she said, still gazing up at the map, her back to the room. ‘Satellite imaging, military exercises, local contacts. NASA has a research unit in that part of the world. We use whatever we can, however we can. If that’s OK with you, Bill?’
The balding man muttered something, but was otherwise silent. No one else spoke.
‘That’s it then,’ said the original speaker, pocketing his laser pointer and shuffling his papers into a neat pile. ‘We adapt, we improvise.’
He lit another cigarette.
‘And we’d better do it quickly. Before this whole thing turns into even more of a disaster than it already is.’
He picked up his papers and swept from the room, followed by the rest of the group. The woman alone remained, one hand held at her neck, the other reaching up to the map.
‘Gilf Kebir,’ she murmured, touching a finger to the paper, holding it there a moment before placing her foot over the lamp’s On-Off button. Pressing down with the toe of her shoe, she plunged the room into darkness.
FOUR MONTHS LATER, PARIS
They were waiting for Kanunin in his hotel suite when he got back from the nightclub. The moment he stepped through the door they took out his bodyguard with a single, silenced shot to the temple and punched him to the floor, his ankle-length coat tangling around him in a swirl of black leather. One of the hookers started screaming and they shot her as well, a 9mm dumdum into her right ear, the entire left side of her head exploding away like a shattered eggshell. Waving a pistol at her companion to indicate that if she said a word the same would happen to her, they forced Kanunin onto his belly and yanked his head back so that he was staring up at the ceiling. He didn’t bother to struggle, knew who they were, knew it was pointless.
‘Just get on with it,’ he coughed.
He closed his eyes and waited for the bullet. Instead, there was a rustle of paper followed by the feel of something – lots of things – pattering down onto his face. His eyes flicked open again. Above him hovered the mouth of a paper bag from which was dribbling a steady stream of pea-sized steel ball-bearings.
‘What the—’
His head was forced back further as a knee pressed into the base of his spine, huge hands clasping vice-like around his forehead and temples.
‘Mr Girgis invites you to dine with him.’
Other hands clawed at his mouth, prising apart his jaws, yanking them open, the bag coming closer to his face so that the ball-bearings dribbled directly down into his mouth, choking him. He bucked and writhed, his screams no more than a muted gurgle, but the hands held him tight and the pouring continued, on and on until the bag was empty and his jerking had grown weaker and eventually stopped altogether. They dropped his body on the fl
oor, steel trickling from between his bloodied lips, put a bullet through his head just to be certain and, without even glancing at the girl hunched against the wall, left. They were already speeding away into the dawn traffic when the hotel suddenly echoed to the crazed soprano of her screaming.
THE WESTERN DESERT, BETWEEN THE GILF KEBIR AND DAKHLA OASIS – THE PRESENT
They were the last Bedouin still making the great journey between Kufra and Dakhla, a 1,400-kilometre round trip through the empty desert. Using only camels for transport, they carried palm oil, embroideries, and silver and leather-work on the way out, and returned with dates, dried mulberries, cigarettes and Coca-Cola.
It made no economic sense, such a journey, but then it was not about economics. Rather, it was about tradition, keeping alive the old ways, following the ancient caravan routes that their fathers had followed, and their fathers before them, and their fathers before them, suviving where no one else could survive, navigating where no one else could navigate. They were tough people, proud, Kufra Bedouin, Sanusi, descendants of the Banu Sulaim. The desert was their home, travelling through it their life. Even if it did make no economic sense.
This particular trip had been hard even by the harsh standards of the Sahara, where no journey is ever easy. From Kufra, the trek south-east to the Gilf Kebir and through the al-Aqaba gap – the direct route east would have taken them into the Great Sand Sea which even the Bedouin dared not cross – had passed off uneventfully.
Then, at the eastern end of the gap, they had discovered that the artesian well at which they would normally have filled their water-skins had dried up, leaving supplies dangerously tight for the remaining three hundred kilometres. It was a concern, but not a disaster, and they had continued north-east to Dakhla without any great sense of alarm. Two days on, however, and still three from their destination, they had been hit by a ferocious sandstorm, the feared khamsin. Forced to hunker down for 48 hours until it blew over, their water supplies had in the process dwindled to next to nothing.
