We departed from Langley at sixteen hundred, midnight in Baghdad. Everything about the flight was classified: the plane, its cargo and especially its mission. The precision bombing of Saddam's bunker with a tactical warhead, and the landing of two hundred Iraqi exiles, who would take over government immediately, was not going to take place, officially.
My co-pilot, Jeremiah Manning, and I flew Harriers since the Falklands, so we know all there is to know about vertical takeoff, which was probably the main reason why British pilots were chosen for this mission. Although there must have been some political afterthoughts: nobody has dropped an atom bomb on a live enemy since WWII, and even if our baby only yields 18 kilotons, Washington must have hesitated to use it, without the consent of its allies.
'Forty mil!' announced Jerry and I braced myself for the building pressure of re-entry in the atmosphere. At the exit point, roughly forty kilometres above the earth's surface, I had cut the engines and we had coasted up to a high point of around sixty kilometres before beginning to fall back down to around thirty-five kilometres. As it descends into denser air, our plane is pushed up by the increased aerodynamic lift. At this point we briefly fire our engines, propelling ourselves back into space. The whole process is repeated every two minutes, the aircraft skipping off the top layer of the atmosphere, like a pebble skittering in slow motion across the surface of a pond.
'They're puking,' said Jerry. 'Every single one of them!'
I glanced at one of the monitors surveying the cabin. At Langley our passengers had been issued with traditional air sickness bags. Weightlessness renders those useless, but nobody seemed to have thought of that. The XY-Zoroaster was an experimental aircraft after all, and theoretically the sensation of slowly transiting, from weightlessness to about one point five gravity, should not be more burdening than using a swing in a children's playground.
'Let them suffer a bit,' I said, shrugging it off.
'You'll go down into history as a callous bastard, Joey!' my co-pilot said, indicating the battery of recording equipment our principals had installed in the cockpit.
'Our body is God's temple,' I answered, 'those politicians back there, should have shown more respect for their bodies!'
At forty-seven years of age, I am top-fit and, like all work-out buffs, I tend to look down on people who neglect their physique.
'You know,' I grinned, 'that one of those sorry sacks of shit, actually asked to be seated in the smoking zone?'
Jerry didn't answer. He doesn't share my enthusiasm for exercise. He is about my age and there is some grey at his temples, but he is one of those skinny types who, time and again, seem to pass their physical effortlessly, no matter the amount of abuse they inflict on their body.
After that we had no more time for banter. The distance between Langley and our target was 10.001 kilometres, a trip that would involve about eighteen skips. From the time we set our bearings to 45.4 degrees northeast, the flight would take us just over seventy-two minutes.
Even if there had been secret tests with hypersonic flight for years, our mission was a historic one for sure. Not only were we the first passenger flight to cruise at an average speed of Mach 10, we were also turning a new page in military history.
My mind must have been wandering for a moment, for the knife was already at my throat before I could react to Jerry, crying out in surprise.
'Don't move!'
The fellow, whose swarthy face was reflected in the instrument panel before me, didn't have to repeat that order. I have a healthy respect for eleven centimetres of honed carbon steel, pressed against my jugular vein.
'Take it easy,' I croaked. 'We can work it out!'
My eyes darted over the instrument panel. The cabin-monitor showed rows of motionless passengers, sagging in their seats. It seemed that death threats and skyjacking were not the only crimes the swarthy pirate was committing.
'What did you do?' asked Jerry. 'Poison them?'
'Never mind,' said the hijacker. 'Just obey orders, and we'll all survive!'
'You are a UN-soldier,' said Jerry, glancing over his shoulder. 'You're supposed to keep the peace. This is mutiny, they'll hang you!'
The vague image, reflected by the instrument panel, showed shoulder patches and a sky-blue beret. The man's dark complexion and short, bristly beard would cause alarm bells to go off in any aircraft security personnel. Except that this guy was our security chief himself, the captain in command of a heavily armed platoon, the existence of which all governments on the planet would deny.
'You go here,' the man said.
He pushed a piece of paper in my hand. I read: "31°47' N, 35°13' E"
'Okay,' I said, 'no sweat, mate!'
While I punched in the new coordinates, I repeated them out loud.
'Jerusalem!' Jerry said.
This guy is incredible, I bet he can work out geographic coordinates much faster in his head, than you and I could key them into a computer.
'So you want to nuke the oldest civilization in the West!' I said. 'Why?'
'He's nuts,' said Jerry, who is known in the force as an atheist radical, 'these guys have been crazy for more than four thousand years!'
The hijacker said nothing. He stood behind me and the blade of his K-Bar knife tickled my throat.
'Sorry,' I said, 'I have to bend over for this.'
'For what?'
'Every two minutes,' I replied, 'we dip into the earth's atmosphere. At that time, I have to fire the engines in order to go back into space. Alternatively we can plunge to the surface; it would take us just under a full minute to crash.'
The knife did not leave my throat and nothing happened for about twenty seconds.
'You better decide now,' Jerry said. 'Once we are on a dive, it shall be too late!'
That was, of course, nonsense. The XY-Zoroaster is the most fuel-effective airplane ever built, and even if we were to lose several kilometres of height, we should not have any problems getting back into space, using our special air-breathing combined-cycle engines. But soldier boy didn't know that and Jerry's lie signalled me that he knew what I was up to.
'Ten seconds from now,' I said.
I bent over, grasping the joystick. The hand with the knife yielded and I started counting down. Then I pushed the throttle to full.
The hijacker flew backwards and was knocked unconscious against one of the steel beams, that separate the cockpit from the cabin. By the time we reached Mac 15, Jerry hollered that I should slow down. I was struggling to get out of the upper layers. Not because of our unheard of acceleration. Jerry and I were wearing G-suits and the poor bastards in the cabin were not my immediate concern. For all I knew, they were all dead, before I even began my manoeuvre.
'It's stuck!' I shouted.
Nobody had ever reached this kind of speed, within the earth's atmosphere, and the plane reacted sluggishly, whereas the throttle resisted our combined efforts to force it back.
Now, heat was our problem. Any object, speeding through the atmosphere will compress and heat the air in front of it. Hypersonic aircraft, that fly along strictly atmospheric trajectories can only get rid of this heat by dumping it into their fuel and then burn the fuel in the engines. That is why earlier hypersonic aircraft were inefficient: the faster you fly the more fuel you must carry as a heat sink. In the end, the first hypersonic planes were carrying more fuel than payload.
By hopping in and out of space, the XY-Z was able to radiate the excess heat.
Which is to say that we did not have any conventional heat protection.
Seconds before we burned to a crisp, the pointed nose of our magnificent aircraft pierced the last layer of the exosphere. The sensation of weightlessness felt like a fresh shower on a hot day.
Jerry got out of his chair and used olive-green cord from our survival kit to truss up our knocked-over pirate.
'Any damage?' he yelled.
There was. At first I even thought that all systems were off. Not that it affected our flight. Now that our speed was down to a more conventional Mach 10, the XY-Z reacted lightly to the joystick and the throttle was as functional as ever. The instruments were the problem. Not the simple ones, like the compass or the altimeter, they worked fine all right. But almost everything else failed.
Jerry was fiddling with the GHFS.
'Don't!' I said. 'Strict radio silence!'
'Except in an emergency,' Jerry argued. 'What do you think this is?'
I shrugged. What did we have to lose? The mission had to be aborted anyway. Or rather it had aborted itself. How are you going to precision bomb without instruments?
Or tell your principals, without a radio, that you'd like to come home. The Global High Frequency System only emitted static today.
'Have you tried Sigonella?' I asked.
'And Incirlik,' Jerry said. 'Both ground stations are stone dead!'
'And there is no transmission from the GPS-satellites either,' I worried.
'There are no satellites!' Jerry concluded.
He was staring into the void beyond the porthole, where the familiar constellations blinked their reassuring lights. It was a moonless night, but you could work out the position of earth's guardian by the absence of starlight in that location. But none of the luminous dots were visible, that should have given away the presence of orbiting satellites, not one.
'Let's go down right here,' Jerry said.
I nodded. We had to look after the passengers and, considering our cargo, Jerusalem was the only safe place to land for hundreds of miles around.
But the eternal city was not where it should have been. When XY-Z thundered out of the clouds, we did not see any light at all. When we came closer, tilting to commence our vertical landing, our landing lights revealed only stony desert and heavily wooded hills.
'Take the highest point!' Jerry advised.
With his eyes riveted to the monitors of the tail-video's, he talked me in, centimetre after centimetre.
When I cut the engines and an unworldly silence was invading the cockpit, Jerry was busy with his pocket calculator.
'I don't believe it myself,' he said, 'but we are right on top of the Temple Mount!'
The casualties were heavy. The G-forces had provoked massive heart attacks in more than hundred weak or elderly politicians. The stuff that the hijacker had used to sedate them, had killed at least another twenty passengers.
Even one of the commandos of the security platoon had succumbed to the drug-cocktail in his coffee. We were no more than fifty now.
Jerry and I didn't take any more chances: we had taken all the soldiers' weapons, while they were still unconscious. Now my co-pilot and I were the only ones who were armed to the teeth.
'Where are we?' asked the young woman with the sergeant's stripes, who was very efficient in organizing the evacuation of the dead and the wounded.
'Jerusalem,' said Jerry.
'O yeah?' said the girl. 'My name is Sarah Levi. Take it from an Israeli: Jerusalem does not look like this at all!'
'Not in our time,' I said.
While I watched the realization dawning on the horror-stricken face of the young woman, I went over the whole equation again, but there was no other explanation: we had crossed the time-barrier.
Since Einstein, mankind had known about the relation between time, space and speed, but nobody had ever experienced it beyond the schoolboy-experiment of walking in a moving train.
Another first! But colonel Joey Marsh would not be remembered for commanding the first hypersonic passenger flight, nor for dropping the first atom bomb since Nagasaki. Not even for being the first to cross the time barrier. I would be remembered for disappearing from the radar screens and never being heard of since. With my two hundred passengers and my live warhead, I would overshadow the bloody Bermuda Triangle itself!
Using a pneumatic shovel from our cargo bay, we had buried our dead. An elderly man with a white beard had mumbled something in a foreign tongue, signing crosses in the air. Another, younger man had spoken in another language, bowing to the east, kneeling and touching his forehead to the ground.
Now we were together in the cabin, having breakfast. We had enough water and emergency rations to last us a couple of weeks. We also had fuel enough to try and reverse the manoeuvre that brought us here, but we wanted to rest first and calculate everything that was calculable. At least now our batteries were still charged.
'Company!' Jerry warned, raising his P90. He had taken the first watch, scanning our surroundings from the safety of the cockpit.
I followed his pointing finger to one of the screens. A very old man and a boy, guiding him by the hand, stood out there. They were dressed in the manner of desert-people: long robes and pieces of cloth to cover their heads.
Both men fell to their knees. I could almost understand why. After we had buried the dead, I had lingered outside and XY-Zoroaster, a black triangle of steel and epoxy, standing on its tailfins, thirty-five meters high, was an awesome sight, even to me, a sophisticated citizen of the 21st century. No wonder that two prehistoric shepherds thought that they were in the presence of the Most High.
The old man was crying and speaking in some guttural language.
'Aramaic,' said Sarah Levi, who was looking on over my shoulder. 'He is asking for mercy!'
I must have gaped at her, then she added in an irritated tone of voice:
'What? So I am a scholar, as well as a soldier! How else are we going to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls?'
'Ask their names,' I said.
The two poor souls outside flattened themselves as our hailing system boomed over their heads.
I could make out 'Abraham' when the old man answered, but the second name was lost to me.
Sarah was shouting what sounded like a string of abuse. The old man looked up at our cathedral of black steel, worlds of sorrow in his eyes.
'What is going on?' I asked. 'Tell me, for Pete's sake!'
'The young guy is Ishmail,' Sarah spat. 'It is now years before the birth of Isaac, who shall become the ancestor of the Jewish people. This first son of Abraham is the progenitor of the Arab race, so let's strike at the root of the evil!'
I watched in horror as the old man was binding his son's hands behind his back and laying him, face down, on a flat rock. When Abraham's dagger flashed in the early sunlight, I was running down the ladder and shouting 'No!'
Was it an act of God that, at this very moment, I saw a ram with its horns entangled in a bush?
We made it back, thanks to Jerry. Our calculations might have been a fatal millimetre off, but my co-pilot's uncanny sense of direction pointed us smack in the middle of the black hole, that almost ripped us apart, but finally transported us back to our own universe.
The digital clock on the instrument panel announced August 1st 2002, 1.32 A.M. We had lost one half hour, not much for a trip to Old Testament times. Our disappearance and subsequent reappearance were not on any newscast and all seemed to be as it was before. Until I caught a newsflash about a single casualty from and event called 'Palestine Festival'. A young boy seemed to have been stabbed to death by an inebriated sailor. The newscaster spoke about 'unheard-of violence' and announced a week of mourning throughout the Holy Land. The boy's burial was to take place today; the rites would be celebrated by an ecumenical team of officials from all world-religions.
While we headed home, I left Jerry in command. Not so much because he had saved our lives, although that played a certain role. But I needed the hour from here to Langley to rehearse my explanation of the events.
Why and how had I lost one hundred and fifty passengers, why was I bringing my warhead back and above all why did I embark on my mission in the first place? I was sure of it: the politicians would find it utterly incomprehensible that I had intended to nuke Baghdad, and who had ever heard of a gentleman, named Saddam Hussein?
Maybe I could tell them the truth: I had saved the life of a prehistoric shepherd, and that was all there was to tell. I did not want to be accused of jumping to conclusions!
After the old man and the boy had sacrificed the ram and we had eaten some chops that tasted remarkably gamy, we sat around the fire.
'Abraham,' the old man said, beating his chest.
Ishmail did the same, so I too pointed to myself and said my name was Joey.
The old man just looked stunned, but Ishmail kissed the leather of my boots, before he spoke my name, pronouncing it carefully:
'Jahweh!'