Chapter Nine

There were hundreds of them down there. Most of them dead, but not all. She saw golden energy sprinkled throughout the column. The vast majority of them were on foot. They trailed along for a quarter of a mile as they threaded through the narrow pass in the side of the mountain. Some of them were alive.

“Am I clear?” Sarah shouted into her microphone. Someone tapped her shoulder—that was the signal for “affirmative”. They had practiced this, drilled it in Omaha but that hadn’t really counted. The fuel depot at the air base there had been swarming with ghouls. They had flown around for nearly three hours picking off the hungry dead from the air until it was safe to land. That time nobody had been able to shoot back.

The flatbed beneath them, the same one she’d seen in Egypt, had two machine gun positions on its back. Both of them were crewed by living people in light blue paper shirts. Sarah had never killed a living person before.

In any war, though, somebody had to shoot first.

The SMAW, which she had learned stood for Shoulder-mounted Multi-purpose Assault Weapon, came with a little rifle built into the side of the tube. You weren’t supposed to hurt anybody with the rifle. It was just for lining up the real shot. Sarah squeezed the trigger and a cloud of splinters jumped off the flatbed. One of the machine gunners looked down, his head turning comically fast.

“Rocket,” she announced, and depressed the firing bar at the same time she touched the trigger mechanism. The magneto at the back of the SMAW clicked and super-hot plasma jumped out the back of the tube and through the far crew door, which she had remembered to open first. There was no recoil whatsoever, though the rocket launcher vibrated so much her hands went numb.

When she had chosen the SMAW from the arsenal on Governors Island she had rationalized that she was fighting liches, not just ghouls, and so she needed something bigger than just a sidearm. She hadn’t considered at the time that she might be aiming her rockets at living people.

She had no choice. Those machine guns had to be taken out, and quickly. They could chew up the Jayhawk in seconds. She had no choice. She kept telling herself that.

Her rocket looked to her like a perfectly straight silver line drawn between the helicopter and the converted railroad car. When it reached the wooden surface of the flatbed it expanded in a cloud of brown and grey smoke. What looked like two hundred pounds of red jelly splattered across the flatbed and painted the side of the yurt, coated the dead men turning the flywheels near the front of the car. The dead men didn’t stop.

The other machine gunner, the one she hadn’t aimed for, was down on the deck, clutching his ears. He was coated in red jelly too. Sarah couldn’t find any sign that her target, either the machine gun itself or the man who had been standing next to it, had ever even existed. Except for all that jelly.

She wanted to vomit, she very much intended to lean out the crew door of the Jayhawk and heave her guts out. Instead she rolled back inside and got out of the way of her replacements.

Three mummies stepped into the rectangular crew door opening and pulled open the telescoping tubes of their M72 Light Antitank Weapons. In perfect unison the mummies lifted the tubes to their cheeks, selected targets, and let fly. Their rockets popped out of their tubes with a hollow sound, fah-wuhp, fah-wuhp, fah-wuhp and twisted in mid-air as stabilizing fins popped out of their casings. Lying on a ballistic blanket on the floor of the helicopter Sarah couldn’t see where the rockets went. Each M72 held only one 66 mm rocket: as one the mummies dropped their tubes out of the crew door and then stepped back to let the third wave move into place.

The solid fuel in the rockets combusted entirely before the rockets left their tubes. The exhaust gases thus produced could reach fourteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Sarah thought Ayaan had been right. She’d told Sarah many times that if you focused on the numbers and statistics and technical details it helped you not think about what you were doing to human bodies.

Red jelly... Sarah shivered and pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head.

She moved forward to stand in the hatch to the crew compartment where her father sat next to Osman. Gary crouched on the floor behind her father’s seat. He looked different somehow but she couldn’t place it. Maybe he had grown some. Yes, his legs looked longer. Maybe her father was subconsciously working on him even in that moment. “Make a wide circle but let me see what we achieved,” she told Osman, who simply nodded.

Through the crew door she studied the column of people living and dead. She saw that half the flatbed looked damaged and parts of it were definitely on fire. It was still moving. It should stop at any moment as the Tsarevich gave the signal to halt the column and take cover. That was basic military tactics—the longer he stayed out in the open the longer she could dominate the engagement from the sky.

This was exactly what Sarah wanted. The best available cover was a narrow cut in the mountain about half a mile back down the road behind him. It would be impossible to attack the defile effectively from the air. Sarah had spent most of a day burying remotely-detonated mines in the road surface there.

She was pretty proud of her strategy. It made a lot of logical sense. There was only one flaw in it.

“He hasn’t changed course at all,” she said out loud when five minutes had passed. That was more than enough time for a retreat order to go down the chain of command. The flatbed still crawled forward. The dead—and the living—still clustered in its wake. They were sitting ducks. She could pick them off at her leisure.

“Did he bring them all this way just so I could kill them?” she demanded.

“He doesn’t seem the type to cry over casualties,” Osman replied. She was glad somebody was talking to her. She looked back to the tail end of the crew compartment where Ptolemy stood waiting with a fresh SMAW for her. She chewed on her lip.

“He must know something I don’t,” she announced. She leaned out of the crew door and studied the column once again. One machine gun position remained on the flatbed but nobody stood anywhere near it, nobody with hands. The living cultists down there had assault weapons but she could easily stay out of their range. The Tsarevich’s yurt was on fire. That was something. As she watched, however, a group of cultists with fire extinguishers blasted it with white foam.

“Okay,” she said, uncertain of what else to do. “Let’s get ready for another attack.” Even as she said it though she heard something. The noise of the helicopter drowned out almost every sound but she heard another engine roaring, a gasoline engine. She looked down and saw an enormous truck gunning up the side of the road, looking like it might collide with the flatbed. It had flames painted on its doors and its exposed engine chugged and pistoned madly, belching pale, thin smoke out of half a dozen tailpipes.

Standing up in its cargo bed, a gorilla or maybe just a really hairy man lifted a long tube to his shoulder. Sarah recognized the rectangular plates mounted on its business end. It was a Stinger missile, an antiaircraft weapon.

The Tsarevich must have learned about repelling airborne attacks after the time Ayaan tried the same trick on him in Egypt. A pile of Stingers lay at the gorilla’s feet.

“Dive!” she shouted, and Osman spun the helicopter into a banking descent so sharp she lost her footing and fell out of the crew door, her fall cut painfully short as her safety line snapped taut. “Osman!” she screamed, dangling in mid-air three feet below the Jayhawk’s belly. “Osman!”

“I’m busy,” he shouted back.

The gorilla discharged his weapon. A silver line of smoke shot out of its muzzle. Osman dipped the helicopter over to one side but the Stinger was a guided missile and it was already locked on to the Jayhawk. As Sarah watched it rolled over in mid-flight and gimbaled around to track the helicopter’s exhaust.

Osman dropped the helicopter again and Sarah bounced madly on the end of her line. With hands like claws she grabbed again and again, trying to grab the cord. The green pointy tops of the fir trees below came rushing up at her but—but—yes—she had one hand on the cord. She managed to pull herself up a fraction of an inch before the rolling helicopter knocked her loose again.

She could hear the Stinger coming. It cut through the air with a high-pitched sreech. Sarah grabbed the line with both hands and hauled herself up, her body flailing in the wind.

A dozen linen-wrapped hands reached down and grabbed her shoulders, her arms, her neck, even her ears. The mummies hauled her up and inside the helicopter moments before the belly of the Jayhawk started hissing and rattling, smacking aside the higher treetops. Osman dropped them another two feet and wood and pine needles exploded against the undercarriage. Everything smelled like sap.

Fifty yards behind them the Stinger’s stabilizing fins tangled up in a mangled larch. The missile exploded in a brilliant cloud of fire and dark smoke. Osman tapped his yoke and the helicopter lifted up, out of the trees again.

“Alright, girl,” he said in her earphones. “What in hell comes next?”