Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [46]
A half hour later, we broke free of the coastal monsoon and saw before us the desert: blindingly bright, parched, pristine. Not a settlement, not a road to be seen. Nick the pilot swung an opaque combat visor down over his eyes. His voice crackled over the intercom: "Holding at 2,000 feet. On a direct bearing to your coordinates 18 degrees 32 minutes by 52 degrees 36 minutes. Should be there in a little over an hour." The coordinates were for the spot where Bertram Thomas, sixty years earlier, had crossed "the road to Ubar." Because we were heavily loaded and would be burning fuel at a rapid rate, we had elected to head directly to our most promising sites.
Nick: "Off to the left, that's the Wadi Ghadun." This great serpentine dry streambed heads north and into the sands of the Rub' al-Khali. What a trade route this could have been. I imagined caravans bearing frankincense off to the horizon, perhaps to Ubar. But imagining was one thing, and finding hard evidence was another. We could easily go down in the annals of Ubar exploration as hapless dreamers—"misguided at best."
I had read about cold sweats and seen a few in the movies. They hit Humphrey Bogart when he had his back to the wall and realized his automatic was in his other jacket. Wedged into the Huey, I remembered, or thought I remembered, a big close-up of John Garfield, as on a wing and a prayer he coaxed his battered B-24 back to Britain. I knew how he felt. This day would have to lead us somewhere, to something. I looked around. Was anybody else not feeling so good about this outing? Ran and George were lost in thought (conversation was impossible); framed by the barrels of a pair of automatic rifles, Kay smiled over at me, immensely enjoying her first helicopter ride. An old hand at flying desert terrain, Ron Blom shifted his gaze back and forth from the window to the Landsat 5 space image spread across his knees.
Nick the pilot, Ron, and I were linked by headsets. "Ron? Anything?" I asked him. "See anything?"
"Nothing as yet. Some great geology, of course. And up ahead it looks like we're in for a sandstorm."
"Afraid so," Nick confirmed.
I thought out loud, "It's hard imagining anyone actually living out here, isn't it? Now or then." Hoping that they would disagree.
"Yes, it is," said Ron.
"I'd say so," confirmed Nick, then added, "Coming up on target."
Discernible ahead was the ancient dry lakebed that had caught our attention on our very first radar space image. As we dropped down onto it, a cloud of swirling red sand, kicked up by our rotors, engulfed us. "Not to worry," Nick assured us, landing blind and hitting the desert floor. As the cloud of sand drifted clear of the idling helicopter, he warned, "Watch the rotors. Stay where you can see me. Nobody get behind me."
According to our calculations, we were more or less where Thomas had reported the hundred-yard-wide road to Ubar. But now we found the lakebed crisscrossed and churned up by modern vehicle tracks too narrow to show up on our space imaging. They would make it difficult to find and follow Thomas's road. How they got here was answered as three vehicles materialized on the horizon and sped our way.
An Omani military border patrol. Or, as we were to call them, the Phantoms of the Desert. They drove stripped-down, sand-swamped Land Rovers. No doors or windshields, but a few key accessories: racks for extra fuel and water, passenger-side .45-caliber machine guns, and, most critical of all, three extra batteries battened between the front seats. This wasn't the place for a balky starting motor. If you had to get out and walk, you might as well lie down and die.
We never saw the Phantoms'