The Desert of Glass
Chapters (84)
THE DESERT
OF GLASS
By
Michael C. Grumley
Copyright © 2021 Michael C. Grumley
i.ii
CONTENTS
BY MICHAEL C. GRUMLEY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
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78
EPILOGUE
I
II
III
IV
BY MICHAEL C. GRUMLEY
BY MICHAEL C. GRUMLEY
The Last Monument
The Desert of Glass
DEDICATION
To my Mom.
An incredible woman who has given me so much.
Prologue
Prologue
July 1977
There was no sound.
No crickets, no insects, no anything…
but dry, dead air.
Utter silence. Unmoving. Slowing time and existence to a crawl through endless days of searing heat and suffocating air followed by long, empty black nights.
No movement of any kind.
Until it happened—
Almost instantaneously.
Grains of sand began to move across the trembling ground a split second before a massive explosion of sound and speed. Overhead, it was sudden, thunderous, and gone as quickly as it came.
Barely three hundred feet above the ground, with hands gripping the control column like vices, a lone pilot peered intently through the cockpit window into the darkness in front of him, feeling every vibration traveling up through his trembling arms.
The aircraft was under enormous strain, pushed to its limit by twin turbojet engines at the tail of the craft, sending it hurtling forward just below the speed of sound, ensconced in total and utter darkness.
All navigation lights had been turned off, including the interior lights, leaving the only illumination of the pilot’s face coming from the instruments themselves, the only lights keeping the small cockpit from pitch blackness. Except perhaps the dim scattering of stars across the ebony sky above.
A thousand kilometers was all he needed. Due East. Below the radar horizon. Enough to give him a fighting chance.
Fear coursed through his body, down his arms in the same path as the vibrations and into his hands, which remained wrapped around the controls in a death grip. He was fearful of making the slightest mistake, as it would take almost nothing at his velocity and altitude to slam the aircraft directly into the earth at full speed.
His thoughts briefly drifted to the rest of the craft behind him—to his cargo. He almost turned his head as if needing to verify it was still there.
Don’t look! Pay attention!
He squinted tighter and continued peering through the tiny windshield, searching for anything in his way.
But he knew the truth. At this speed, anything he saw would hit him before he could even react, leaving his desperate plight fixed solely upon hope and prayer.
Hope that there was nothing in the way.
And the prayer that he would reach salvation in time.
What the lone pilot could not know, what he couldn’t see, was the sky behind him, which was also black and dotted by a multitude of faint stars appearing like a giant shimmering blanket overhead, with more than enough twinkling lights to hide what was approaching from the rear.
Navigation lights from another jet.