Dust of Eden Read Free

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.
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    B urke, 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