The nearest Humvee was not far away. The men around the nearby fire mostly had their backs to him. Nobody in sight in the other direction. He rose to his full height, looking for signs of movement inside the circle of Covenant vehicles—
One of the Janjaweed emerged from a tent—and saw him.
For a moment, neither man moved. Chase’s gun hand was hidden from the other’s view behind the Hilux. He slowly raised it …
The man stared at him disdainfully, then turned and walked away, toward one of the other groups of loud, whooping thugs. Chase realized what had happened. The militiaman had assumed he was one of the Covenant troopers—in the shifting orange half-light, his pale, dusty clothes could easily be mistaken for their camo fatigues.
He held back until the man moved away, then strode to the Humvee. He made sure nobody was watching, then dropped and rolled underneath it. The Covenant men inside the circle wouldn’t be as gullible.
He could see one of them approaching. He waited for the patrol to pass, then rolled out from under the Humvee and scurried between two of the domes. He knew where Nina’s tent was, and stayed low as he headed for it.
He stopped as he saw another Covenant trooper sitting on a folding chair outside Nina’s illuminated tent. A TAR-21 rifle lay across his lap. “Bollocks,” Chase whispered. There was enough open space between the tents for the soldier to see him and bring up his gun before he could get close enough for a knife attack, and if he fired a shot, the entire camp would be alerted.
He needed another way …
He backed up, weaving between the tents as he followed a circuitous route to bring him around behind Nina’s tent, watching for the men on patrol. One passed; Chase darted to his destination and took out the knife. He wouldn’t have long before the other man came back—if he didn’t make it inside in time, he would be in plain view. Jabbing the knife through the fabric at the base of the curved frame, he quickly drew it across to cut a slit. When it was wide enough to fit through, he ducked inside—
The heavy base of a battery-powered lamp came within an inch of smashing down on his head.
“Eddie!” squeaked Nina, just barely arresting the blow.
“Shh!” Chase hissed frantically, a finger to his lips. He glanced back through the hole, seeing the patrolling trooper walking past.
Nina put down the lamp beside the slit and hugged him. “Oh my God!” she whispered. “You found me, I can’t believe you found me!”
“I can’t believe it either—we didn’t expect the Covenant to be out here ahead of us.”
“We?” She made a face. “Oh, so Sophia’s alive too?”
“’Fraid so. But what about you? Not that I’m complaining, but why’d they bring you along?”
“They needed me to find Eden, since I was the only one who’d seen the map.”
Chase frowned, noticing a map, several pages of notes, and the cylinder she had taken from the frozen city on a folding table. “And you told them?”
“Not … exactly,” she answered hesitantly. He stared at her. “What? I don’t know where the damn place is. I was stringing them along!”
“Yeah, and you strung them along to thirty miles from it!”
“It’s a big desert!”
“They’re a big organization!”
“Actually, I don’t think they are—they’ve started running out of goons … and can we discuss this later? Once I’m, y’know, out of here?”
“Yeah, I think we ought to,” he snapped as he went to the door flap. The zipper was slightly down, giving him an eyehole through which he could see the back of the sitting guard’s head. He hadn’t heard anything—yet.
Chase moved back to Nina as she gathered her belongings, including the cylinder, and stuffed them into a backpack. “Okay, once the patrol goes past, go out and hide under one of the Humvees.” He realized she wasn’t looking at him; her gaze was fixated on the door. “What?” He turned his head to see—
“Shadows!” hissed Nina, just as he realized what was wrong. The lamp was casting their silhouettes like shadow puppets across the fabric.
Two silhouettes.
And he heard the chair creak as the man outside stood and began to tug down the door’s zipper—
Chase hurled his knife as the Covenant trooper looked inside. The blade stabbed deep into his neck with a wet thuk. The man let out a choked, gargling gasp, then toppled through the door. The entire tent shook.
“Get ready to go,” Chase told Nina as he pulled the trooper inside and picked up his assault rifle.
Nina dropped to all fours, lifting the cut fabric and peering through.
She saw a pair of boots. “Uh-oh.”
The guard outside yanked up the slit, revealing Nina behind it. She looked up at him as he pointed his gun at her face—
Chase fired the TAR-21, sending a sweep of bullets through the tent’s wall above Nina. The Covenant soldier screamed and fell backward.
“Get under the Humvee!” Chase shouted, rushing to the door to locate the other patrolling guard. Nina scrambled through the slit, vaulting the fallen soldier and diving beneath the nearest 4×4. Shouts rose all around, Janjaweed and Covenant forces responding to the gunfire.
Chase spotted the remaining guard ducking behind a tent. Another burst of fire from the stolen TAR-21, the taut nylon puckering as bullets slashed through it, and the soldier tumbled back into view with several bloody wounds across his chest.
More movement, beyond the Humvees. A group of Janjaweed running to investigate, AK-47s raised.
Chase fired again. Blood puffed from the head of one of the running men, who fell. The others scattered, taking cover behind the armored vehicles. One militiaman looked around a Humvee and recognized Chase—it was the man who had ignored him earlier, assuming he was a member of the Covenant.
He wasn’t ignoring him now, ducking back and yelling. More men were coming. Chase fired a last couple of shots, felling another Janjaweed, then retreated into the tent and exited through the hole.
Sophia heard gunfire from her vantage point atop the dune. She had been tracking Chase through the Lee-Enfield’s scope until losing sight of him among the tents; now she swept her sights back and forth, hunting for targets.
She found one. “Well, well,” she said as she lined up the crosshairs on the white hair. “Good-bye, Mr. Callum …”
Callum stood with Vogler and Zamal, the latter engaged in a shouting match with Hamed. Covenant troops had moved to protect their leaders, facing off against the militiamen. “One of your men shot at us!” the Janjaweed leader yelled in Arabic.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Zamal replied, “but it wasn’t us.”
One of Hamed’s lieutenants, the man who had seen Chase, ran to them. “I saw him! It was a white man, like him!” He shoved Callum in the chest, knocking him back a step—
Half the man’s head blew apart in an explosive shower that splattered across the crowd of Janjaweed.
For a moment, nobody moved, frozen in shock.
Then the guns on both sides came up.
The Covenant forces, better trained, fired first, taking down eight men in an instant.
But there were more than eight men facing them. AKs blazed, the Janjaweed firing wildly on full auto. Three Covenant troopers went down, spouting blood.
Vogler, Zamal, and Callum ran, their remaining soldiers covering them as they fired into the crowd. Hamed dived the other way, using his men as shields. “Defensive positions!” Vogler yelled. “Get to the Humvees!”
Sophia harrumphed at the results of her shot. She tried to track Callum, but the scene below was too chaotic. “Arse,” she muttered, searching for other targets.
Chase joined Nina beneath the Humvee. “Not quite what I planned, but it’ll do,” he said, hearing the thudding bark of AKs against the crisp chatter of the Covenant’s more modern weapons.
“Great, they’re fighting each other,” said Nina, “but we’re still right in the middle of them! How
are we going to get out of here?”
Chase looked over at the parked technicals. “We’ll nick one of those.”
More gunfire and shouting from behind. The Covenant survivors were forming a protective circle, using the Humvees for cover. “If we can get to them.”
Chase saw another Janjaweed run from a tent, carrying a rocket launcher. “Now’s a good time to try!” They crawled out and ran for the pickups.
Shots whipped past as a Janjaweed saw them. Chase grabbed Nina and dived behind a tent as more bullets tore through the tattered material. “Stay down!” he told her, switching the gun to full auto and twisting to return fire. The spray of bullets carved across the gunman’s stomach.
A sound, close by, the clack of a rifle’s charging handle. Chase rolled to see another Janjaweed run out from behind the technicals, the fear and confusion on his face replaced by anger as he saw the Englishman.
Chase whipped up his gun, pulled the trigger—
It clicked.
Empty.
The Janjaweed gave Chase a sadistic smile—and a ragged hole blew open in his chest, the impact of a .303 rifle bullet slamming him to the ground.
The echoing crack of the Lee-Enfield reached Chase a moment later. “Cheers, Soph,” he said, dropping the empty TAR-21 and drawing the Browning. “Okay, Nina, we”—he saw one of the Janjaweed hoisting a rocket launcher onto his shoulder, lining it up on the Humvees—“need to get the fuck down!”
He threw himself onto her as the rocket-propelled grenade streaked from the tubular launcher.
It slammed into one of the Humvees, the explosion tearing off the wheels and flipping the whole vehicle end over end among the Covenant’s tents. One trooper was torn apart by shrapnel, another crushed under the massive 4×4. It came to rest with its smoldering underbelly pointing into the air at an angle, nose half buried in the sand.
Whoops and cheers came from the Janjaweed. “Jesus!” Nina gasped. “Glad you didn’t decide to take that truck!”
“Didn’t like the color,” said Chase. He helped her up, then picked his way toward the technicals, pistol at the ready. Gunfire sounded all around as the Janjaweed moved in on the Covenant, bullets clanking off the Humvees’ armor. Screams pierced the firelit night.
Chase crouched lower, coming around a half-collapsed tent to reach the technicals. He indicated the one with a key in its ignition. “That’s our ride.”
“It’s pointing the wrong way.” The Hilux was facing into the camp, toward the Humvees.
“That’s why they invented steering wheels. Come on.”
The militiamen’s attention was focused on the Covenant, nobody watching the fringes of the camp. They reached the first technical, a rust-pocked old Ford pickup. Chase moved around the truck’s rear, seeing one of the campfires, now abandoned, not far away. Waving Nina on, he headed for the decapitated Hilux—
A Janjaweed jumped from the back of another technical near the fire, carrying a case of RPG rounds. He saw Chase—and yelled a warning, dropping the box and groping for his AK.
Chase snapped up the Browning and fired, hitting the man’s arm and spinning him against one of the gas cans strapped to the pickup’s side. He reeled back, shrieking, before falling onto the fire in an explosion of flying embers. The shrieks became much louder as he leapt back up, clothes and hair aflame.
Half a dozen Janjaweed ran around the first pickup, guns raised.
Chase fired again—not at the militiamen, but at the gas can.
A jet of fuel spurted from the hole—and splashed over the burning man as he staggered in blind agony. Flames surged back along the gushing gas—
The can exploded, liquid fire sluicing out. The screaming man was consumed, as was a second, larger can, which blew up and bowled the pickup into the approaching gunmen inside a roiling fireball.
Chase reached the Hilux, shielding his face from the heat, and looked around to see if there were any more Janjaweed posing an immediate threat.
There were. A man on the edge of a group near the Humvees pulled the pin from a grenade, about to throw it at the Hilux—
His wrist was blown in half by one of Sophia’s bullets. The severed hand plopped to the ground at his feet, still clutching the grenade … which exploded, lacerated Janjaweed flying in all directions.
But there were still plenty more left, and the Covenant troops to worry about as well. Chase looked at the pistol in his hand—then up at the weapon in the pickup’s rear bed. It was an old Kalashnikov PK, a light antiaircraft gun being used here as a heavy machine gun, a belt of ammunition already loaded.
Definitely more firepower than the Browning.
“You drive,” he told Nina as he climbed into the back of the Hilux. “I’ll shoot.”
Nina entered the open cab, searching for the key. “Cute,” she said, finding Hello Kitty. “Drive where?”
“I’ll tell you when I’ve shot a big enough hole to fit through!” He swung the gun around toward the Humvees—and pulled the trigger.
The machine gun roared, the recoil threatening to rip the makeshift mount from the pickup’s floor. Chase held on and swept the PK back and forth. Every fifth round was a tracer, green lines from the Russian ammunition streaking across the camp like lasers, but Chase was barely able to see them through the staccato flames erupting from the muzzle. The flanks of the Humvees cratered, tires bursting and dropping them with a crash onto their run-flat steel inserts. The onslaught was enough to shatter even the armored windows.
A Covenant soldier aimed at him over the hood of a Humvee; Chase hauled the gun around and hosed him with lead. More movement, outside the circle of 4×4s—another group of Janjaweed, realizing that the machine gunner wasn’t a militiaman. Chase turned the barrage on them before they could act on that realization, bullet-riddled bodies tumbling.
The ammo belt reached its end, the thunder stopping abruptly. There were more ammunition boxes in the pickup bed, but he didn’t have time to reload. Nina was bent almost double in her seat, hands pressed against her ears to protect them from the deafening noise. “Start the truck!” he said.
“What?”
“I said start the—never mind!” He jumped into the cab and turned the key. “Go!”
She raised her head. “Which way?”
“Left.”
Nina released the clutch, the Toyota kicking sand from under its tires as it lurched into motion. She turned left—only to see a group of Janjaweed running toward them. “Maybe not,” she said, spinning the wheel to the right.
“I said go left!” Chase shouted.
“Yeah, and there’s a bunch of guys with guns that way!”
“Have you seen what’s this way?”
She looked. “Oh, shit!”
The man who had destroyed the Humvee had reloaded his rocket launcher, lining up a second RPG round—not at the Covenant vehicles, but at the Hilux.
Nina tried to turn but found nowhere to go, armed men on both sides and the burning wreck of the upturned Humvee directly ahead …
“Go straight!” Chase shouted. He shoved his foot down on hers, jamming the accelerator to the floor.
“Eddie, what—”
“Straight!” he said, pointing forward. The Humvee’s broad underside rose out of the sand like a ramp.
“Are you out of your—”
The RPG leapt from its launcher, hurtling across the camp.
“—fucking—”
The Toyota hit the inverted Humvee, shot up the slope—
“—miiiiiind!”
The grenade slammed into the upturned Humvee just as the Toyota cleared the top of the makeshift ramp. It exploded, blasting the wrecked 4×4 into the air. The truck cartwheeled out of the swelling fireball to smash down on top of one of the other Humvees, ripping it in half—along with the Covenant trooper in cover against it.
The Hilux landed in a massive spray of sand, demolishing the dome tents as it plowed through them. Every bone jarred by the impact, Nina looked up—to s
ee another Humvee directly ahead. She yelped and spun the wheel, narrowly missing Vogler as the pickup swerved. Flaming debris rained down behind the Toyota.
She aimed the truck out of the encampment and switched on the headlights. “Where now?”
“Northwest,” said Chase, pointing. “Toward Eden.”
Sophia tracked the fleeing Hilux with the rifle, picking out the person at the wheel. Nina.
She lined up the crosshairs, finger hovering over the trigger … then lowered the gun. “Not just yet,” she murmured.
Movement—much closer than the camp. She snapped her head around to see one of the Janjaweed running toward her. He had heard the rifle shots, worked out her position, and was coming for her.
The Lee-Enfield came back up. “Not tonight,” Sophia said, looking through the scope again. The man was so close that his face entirely filled her magnified field of view—then suddenly there was a large hole in the middle of it. “You have a headache.”
She cycled the bolt, then ran back to the Land Cruiser.
Hamed struggled upright. An explosion had knocked him down, his head hitting a rock, but he had fared better than his men. Many had been massacred, the rest fleeing into the desert to escape the Covenant’s superior firepower.
He looked around. One of the technicals was barreling out into the desert. The woman, he remembered—he had seen her at the wheel just before the blast threw him to the ground.
Anger surged inside him.
He grabbed an AK from a dead man and hurried to where his horse was tied. It was struggling to break free, frightened by the noise, but he quickly took control and mounted the animal, turning to pursue the retreating taillights into the desert.
Vogler bent low and moved along the side of one of the surviving Humvees to reach Zamal. The Arab unleashed a burst of automatic fire, then ducked back into cover. “What’s our status?” he asked.