Operation: Mongolia

- 21 -

Banks made sure he had his rifle on his lap and in easy reach before settling into his driving position. He had a distant hum in his ears and when he touched the steering wheel, he felt an electric tingle run up his hands, wrists, and forearms. Directly ahead of the truck, worms continued to crisscross the track across the lakebed, churning up the sand into ridges and troughs. It was going to make for a bumpy ride.

Here goes nothing.

He switched on the engine, letting it idle while he checked the worms’ response. They surged and circled even faster than before but none came closer than five yards away, as if wary of the combination of the field’s defense and the squad’s firepower.

Let’s hope it lasts.

He feathered the accelerator but the truck refused to budge until he put his foot fully down. The vehicle lurched forward and Reid banged on the roof overhead.

“Carefully please, Cap. We nearly lost the vases there.”

Banks bit back a rejoinder and drove forward along the increasingly furrowed track ahead of them.

Progress was slow but steady to begin with; the worms kept their distance and although Banks couldn’t bring himself to put the truck much above walking pace, they were making headway. The worms circled faster around them, sometimes darting forward only to be repelled back when they were within four or five yards of the protective field. The hum in the air around Banks grew steadily louder and a soft golden light filled the cab. He felt slightly light-headed as if he’d had too much coffee and nicotine on an empty stomach, but it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling.

He looked ahead and for the first time saw a solid outline of a rocky ridge, the far side of the lakebed appearing out of the heat haze. Resisting the urge to head faster towards it, he kept his gaze ahead and concentrated on maintaining a straight line.

The worms had other ideas. A large mound grew up out of the track twenty yards ahead, bigger than any they had yet seen, ten feet across, almost the width of the truck and just as high.

Hynd shouted from somewhere back and above him.

“Let’s plow the road!”

The roar of gunfire—three of them by the sound of it—filled the cab. The worm raised its head up out of the sand, a massive red, wet maw filled with hundreds of pencil fangs. Deep in its throat was a darker, squirming mass. When the rounds hit it, the whole thing exploded in a wash of gore and suddenly Banks’ windshield was coated solid an inch thick with two- to three-inch worms.

He had to slow—he had no visibility but didn’t want to stop, keeping the truck inching forward, chancing to luck that he was maintaining a straight line.

They ran over something large and wet that splashed beneath them, setting the truck wallowing for a heart-stopping few seconds before the wheels hit sand again. The worms on the windshield slid slowly downward, allowing Banks a view out of the top half. The rocky ridge was tantalizingly close now but half a dozen more worms were in danger of blocking their escape, two of them as large as the one they’d just ran over. He looked in his wing mirror and saw that there was only a wet red smear on the track now to mark where the big one had been. The roadway seemed to seethe and roil and he realized that it was the smaller worms eating the remains of the one who had given them birth.

He leaned over and shouted out the window.

“All okay up there?”

“Just fine, Cap,” Hynd replied. “We got a few of the wee fuckers on us but no damage done. The lad’s field seems to be doing the trick.”

“I’m going to head straight for the ridge ahead. Try to keep those fuckers ahead of us away from the road; we might not get so lucky the next time.”

He pressed his foot on the accelerator, taking the truck up to ten miles an hour.

They’d be safe within minutes.

Worms allowing.