Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [48]
"I hate to say it, but if it's all the same to you, we should be turning back," said Nick. "It's hot. We're heavy. And we're not doing all that well on fuel."
Up ahead we could make out where the dunes became a solid mass, swallowing up the caravan tracks we'd followed. If Ubar was buried farther on, it would be impossible to find it. The helicopter banked, turned, and headed back along the road. We scanned it again, now looking for additional features that had caught our attention on our space images.
We passed back over the "L" site. A bust. Next we looked for what might have been a lost oasis where our space imagery showed a patch of infrared radiation. But whatever created it must have been transient—we saw nothing. (When the Landsat 5 satellite passed over, seasonal vegetation may have sprouted from a rain-dampened hollow in the dunes.) It was then that Nick announced, "We're not going to make it. We're burning fuel like mad." He hesitated, then suggested a plan. "Best bet is I drop everyone off, lighten up. Should be able to make it to an emergency fuel dump, then back. Okay?"
"Okay. But could you at least drop us off at the next waypoint, the one at 18 degrees 32 minutes by 52 degrees 31 minutes?"
"Will do."
This was a hot spot that had seemed promising on our SIR-B radar scan. But as we dropped down to it, we could see that it was yet another natural (though unusual) formation, a small limestone hill rising from the surrounding dunescape.
Nick offloaded us at the base of the hill. "Got to keep moving, so no shutting down. Watch yourselves. Should be back in an hour if all goes well..." In less than two minutes, he was on his way. His Huey became a speck on the horizon, then vanished.
We trudged to the top of the hill and found there a single, solemn bedouin grave. We checked the temperature. Shaded, at eye level, it was 120 degrees. The ground temperature, then, would be well over 160. We checked our supplies. Kay had some sandwiches. But most of our water, we realized, was still in the helicopter. We had only a few quarts in backpacks. Normally this would have been plenty, except that out here you were thirsty five minutes after your last drink.
Kay opened the umbrella she had brought along. Earlier on we had kidded her about it. Now, one by one, we took turns strolling over to Kay to double-check the time and gaze out across the desert, burning with a heat so intense it felt as if the oxygen were being drawn from the air. "Heat suffocation" sounded like an appropriate medical term—was there such a thing?
An hour went by. Everyone now just happened to be facing east-southeast, where Nick's helicopter had disappeared across the dunes. Our unspoken thoughts, I'm sure, were similar: what if Nick didn't quite make it back to the fuel dump? What if he ran out of gas or threw a rod or lost a bearing?
Two hours since Nick left. We said nothing, just listened. In the desert stillness, the tiniest of sounds was exaggerated. The crunch of a foot was thunderous, a whisper a shout. Then, two hours and twenty minutes after the helicopter had winged away, we heard a distant thumpety-thump, then spied far off a gnatlike, angellike speck skittering over the dunes.
Once we were aboard, Nick explained that the fuel dump had been marauded, either by drug runners or local bedouin. Out in the desert, fifty-five-gallon drums all but beg you to fill up. Luckily, he had managed to scrounge a few gallons and make it on to an SOAF outpost.
"Sorry about that, mates. It will be on to Shisur, then?"
"If it's okay by you..."
Prior to the drilling of recent bore holes, the well at Shisur had provided the only reliable fresh water in this quadrant of the Rub' al-Khali. As indicated on our space imaging, the Ubar caravan