Excerpt from Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Fuck Oneness, I need another drop of water.


I walk and walk; I walk past dancing monsters made of sand, past a gutted road, a runway-sized road with a bright yellow line painted in the middle, a big crater which may have been the result of a thousand-pound bomb or a natural water reservoir that has dried up. I come across a mud hut, which might have been a military barrack at some point or a nomads' camel stop. There is a pile of ash in a corner. I sift through it to see if there is anything of nutritional value. There is nothing. I am about to turn back but I decide to walk a bit more, my hand in my pocket, fingering and contemplating the pair of rivets like prayer beads.

I climb over a little sandy hill and see the plane sticking out of the sand. I found the fucker, I shout and run towards it.

This is a bad idea. When you see something shiny in the desert, you shall not run towards it; most likely it's something useless like a mirage, or a mirage of something that's useless, like a wrecked plane. While I am running and remembering Desert Survival Level 6B, it occurs to me that my mission here is to rescue the plane. And if you go by the logic of love, and peace and Oneness and everything else that is fucked up about our Central Command's new philosophy of war and advanced survival, then the plane is there to rescue me. As I said, Central Command with their obsession with Oneness have been teaching us 'Moral Enigma, Modern Wars' in the morning, and lecturing us on 'How to Conquer Yourself Before You Conquer Your Enemy' in the afternoon.

Survival courses are all about restating the obvious: What is the temperature at which you lose your sense of direction? It depends on your sense of direction. Does sand have any nutritional value? No, but your own urine filtered through it will keep you alive for an afternoon. Central Command also emphasizes ethical survival. It's not just about staying alive, losing a few pounds, promising yourself to love your wife more, no, you don't just have to get out alive, which you can do if you employ some basic skills, but a better person, a more ethical person.

No guts, no glory, I tell myself and plunge to the task. The plane's nose and the upper part of its canopy jut out of the sand, shining hopefully. I start shovelling the sand with both my hands and realize within a few minutes that it is futile. The more I shovel, the more the sand shifts; the rest of the plane stays out of sight. The sand is very hot and it singes my hands. But I remove my flying jacket and, using that as a shovel, find a way of shifting it. I focus on a small area and start to use my hands again. Underneath the sand isn't so hot. It is cold and moist; it might even have some nutritional value.

The job is done in four to five hours during which I eat another energy bar and take three sips of my passion fruit smoothie. Less than half the fucker is here. The plane has broken off neatly just behind the canopy, part of its port wing peeled off, the back half of the fuselage gone, the rear end a jumble of coloured wires, chewed-up shiny pipes, guts exposed. So this is what I have; the front half of an F15 Strike Eagle with two 500-pound laser-guided bombs, one marked yes, the other marked oh yess in grey stencilled letters. Where did the other half go?

I gently wipe the sand off the canopy. Inside, the cockpit looks familiar. It's like being locked out of your own house, looking in through the window and finding everything in its place, sofa warm and welcoming, dog napping in front of the fireplace, Cath absent-mindedly flicking through The World of Interiors in slow motion. How I long to get in and take off. I go over the controls carefully, looking for any signs of life. But the gyros are stuck, radar screen blank, not a single peep from any of the dozens of shiny lifesavers. How did it get here? And, more importantly, how will it get me out of here? There has to be another half of the plane somewhere in this desert. If I can somehow open it, the radio on this thing may still be working. Radios in these things sometimes go on working when everything else stops working. Even when these things catch fire and everything including the pilot burns to a cinder, the radio keeps going. When rescue teams arrive they find lumps of coal and still-intact fireproof bits like helmets and oxygen masks. These lumps of charred material sit here ignoring desperate messages from a very desperate control tower. On paper your flying jacket is also fireproof but the papers don't tell you it can't protect your eyes from melting in their sockets.

Red Birds © 2018 by Mohammed Hanif. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.