Sandstorm

1:02 A.M.

CASSANDRA LEANEDover the chart table in the captain’s office. Using a satellite map of the region, she had re-created the curator’s map. With a blue Sharpie marker, she had drawn a line from the tomb in Salalah to the one in the mountains, and with a red marker, a line from Job’s tomb to the open desert. She had circled their destination in red, the location of the lost city.

Her present position, Thumrait Air Base, lay only thirty miles away.

“How quickly can you have the supplies ready?” she asked.

The young captain licked his lips. He was the leader of the Harvest Falcon depot, the USAF’s source of supplies and war materials for its bases and troops throughout the region. He carried a clipboard and tapped items off with the tip of a ballpoint pen. “Tents, shelters, equipment, rations, fuel, water, medical supplies, and generators are already being loaded into transport helicopters. You’ll be supplied on-site at zero seven hundred as instructed.”

She nodded.

The man still wore a frown as he studied their place of deployment. “This is the middle of the desert. Refugees are funneling into the air base hourly. I don’t see how placing an advance camp out there will help.”

A gust of wind rattled the asphalt shingles atop the building.

“You have your orders, Captain Garrison.”

“Yes, sir.” But his eyes looked little settled, especially when he glanced out the window to the hundred men lounging on packs, checking weapons, wearing dun-colored sand fatigues, no insignia.

Cassandra let him have his doubts as she headed to the door. The captain had received his orders, passed through the chain of command from Washington. He was to aid her in outfitting her team. Guild command had orchestrated the cover story. Cassandra’s team was a search-and-rescue unit sent to help refugees fleeing the coming sandstorm and to aid in any rescue during the storm itself. They had five all-terrain trucks with giant sand tires, an eighteen-ton M4 high-speed desert tractor, a pair of transport Hueys, and six of the one-man VTOL copter sleds, each fitted and lashed to open-bed four-wheel-drive trucks. The overland team would leave within the half hour. She would be accompanying them.

Exiting the command depot for Harvest Falcon, Cassandra checked her watch. The sandstorm was due to slam into the region in another eight hours. Reports were coming in of winds gusting to eighty mph. Already the winds here, where the mountains met the desert, were kicking up.

And they were heading into the teeth of the storm. They had no choice. Word had come from Guild command, some hint that the source of the antimatter could be destabilizing, that it could self-destruct before it was discovered. That must not happen. Timetables had been accelerated.

Cassandra searched the dark airfield. She watched a lumbering British VC10 tanker touch ground off in the distance, illuminated by landing lights. Guild command had shipped in the men and additional equipment yesterday. The Minister had coordinated with her personally after the firefight last night. It was damn lucky she had learned the location of the lost city before losing Safia. With such a significant discovery, the Minister had been grudgingly satisfied with her performance.

She was not.

She pictured Painter crouched in the alley between the ruins and the tomb. The sharpness of his eyes, the crinkles of concentration, the way he moved so swiftly, pivoting on one leg, sweeping out his gun. She should have shot him in the back when she had the chance. She risked hitting Safia, but she had lost the woman anyway. Still, Cassandra hadn’t shot. Even when Painter swung on her, she had paused a fraction of a second, falling back instead of pushing forward.

She clenched a fist. She had hesitated. She cursed herself as much as she cursed Painter. She would not make that mistake a second time. She stared across the acres of tarmac and gravel.

Would he come?

She had noted that he had stolen her map during his escape, along with one of the vehicles, her own truck. They found it abandoned and stripped of gear, buried in the forest a few miles down the road.

But Painter had the map. He would definitely come.

Yet not before she was ready for him. She had plenty of manpower and firepower to hold off an army out there. Let him try.

She would not hesitate a second time.

A figure appeared from a small outbuilding near the parked trucks, her temporary command center. John Kane strode toward her, his left leg stiff in a splint. He scowled as he stomped to her side. The left side of his face was sealed with surgical glue, giving his features a bluish tint. Beneath the glue, claw marks slashed across his cheek and throat, blackened with iodine. His eyes glinted brighter than usual in the sodium lights. A slight morphine haze.

He refused to be left behind.

“Cleanup was completed an hour ago,” he said, tucking back his radio mike. “Assets have all been cleared out.”

She nodded. All evidence of their involvement with the firefight at the tomb had been removed: bodies, weapons, even the wreckage of the VTOL copter sled. “Any word on Crowe’s crew?”

“Vanished into the mountains. Scattered. There are side roads and camel trails throughout the mountains. And heavy patches of forest in all the deep valleys. He and those sand rats have tucked their tails and gone into hiding.”

Cassandra had expected as much. The firefight had left her team with limited manpower for a proper pursuit and search. They had to take care of their own wounded and clear the site before local authorities responded to the fiery attack. She had evacuated in the first airlift, radioing Guild command of the operation, playing down the chaos, highlighting their discovery of the true site of Ubar.

The information had bought her life.

And she knew to whom she was indebted for that.

“What about the museum curator?” she asked.

“I have men patrolling the mountains. Still no trace of her signal.”

Cassandra frowned. The microtransceiver she had implanted on the woman had a range of ten miles. How was it possible that they hadn’t picked up her signal? Maybe interference from the mountains. Maybe it was the storm system. Either way, she’d eventually expose herself. She’d be found.

Cassandra pictured the small pellet of C4 incorporated into the transceiver. Safia might have escaped…but she was dead already.

“Let’s move out,” she said.