The Lightning Stones

14

Michael Dillman. It had to be. Mercer scanned the ceiling of the cave just a few inches over his head, and he saw the rock protrusion where Dillman had hit and subsequently split open his scalp.

Mercer’s doubts evaporated, and he knew now more than ever that he was on the right path — not just the physical trail of the lightning stones, but also the goal of avenging Abe Jacobs. Mercer needed this wrong to be righted. Someone had murdered his friend, possibly for what was to be found in this cave, and Mercer owed it to him to see this through, no matter where it ended and what it cost.

He moved now with renewed vigor, the near hypoxia he’d been experiencing almost forgotten as adrenaline saturated his blood. Mercer squeezed deeper into the tunnel-like passage, forcing his body through the constricted space and allowing his cave training to take over. Fifteen feet farther, and the walls and roof suddenly opened into a chamber about the size of a small bedroom. The ceiling wasn’t quite the standard eight feet, more like six for the most part, but in one corner it had collapsed into a pile of loose stones with a hole above it. No light made it down from the surface, but Mercer could feel air being drawn up through the ceiling as if from a chimney. It was cold enough for him to see his breath.

Three other things caught his attention as he swept the flashlight beam around the room. One was the odd jagged stripes radiating from the hole in the ceiling and etching their way down the walls and across the floor. It looked as though the gray stone had been painted with snaggy black lines. The second thing was the grotto at the far end of the room. It was a natural formation, about four feet high and two wide, and it seemed most of the black scorch lines terminated at its entrance. The final thing, and the one that held his interest, was the body.

The corpse was obviously ancient. It was little more than black parchment skin drawn over a skeleton that had shrunk and shriveled over time. The dead figure was sitting in the meditative lotus position, with wrists resting on its knees and feet crossed over onto the opposite thigh. The only incongruity was that while the corpse maintained this most Eastern of poses, it was actually resting on its side, so one bony knee stuck up in the air and the head had detached from the neck after it no longer had support. Mercer immediately understood that the body had once sat guarding the entrance to the grotto and someone, Dillman most likely, had moved it out of the way by simply setting it aside without any thought to repositioning it.

Looking more carefully, he saw that ragged holes had been punched through the body at random places and that the skin had discolored around these spots in zigging streaks of darker char. He looked again at the pattern of lines on the walls and the spokes of darker coloration coming from the hole in the ceiling and shooting for the grotto, and he finally understood what was taking place, or at least had taken place here.

He trained the light into the grotto to verify that with a storm still expected topside he was safe, and saw the hollow behind the grotto was empty. The grotto was, in fact, a large geode, and someone — Mercer had to assume Michael Dillman — had removed the crystals that had once lined its interior. Left behind like empty honeycombs were the sockets in which the crystals had formed, and judging by their size the crystals themselves would have been the size of bananas or larger. He flashed back to the wax-paper wrapping recovered from Abe’s trash can. It had spent decades encasing something tubular about the size of a carrot. One of these crystals, he was certain.

As to the rest of the mystery, whatever molecular composition and atomic structure had gone into the crystals’ formation, they had interfered enough with the surrounding natural geomagnetic forces to turn the geode into a big fat lightning rod. The cave had been hit so many times over the past millions of years that the shock had cracked the ceiling, and the natural bolts of searing electricity had scarred the stone and eventually punched holes through the body of a Buddhist or Jain mystic who had decided to crawl in here to die, at what must have been considered a sacred place.

Dillman’s moniker for the stones now made sense.

This all came with another, troubling realization. Mike Dillman had plundered the cavern completely. Mercer scanned every inch of the phone-booth-size geode with his light, contorting his body and craning his neck to see each square inch of its otherworldly interior. There wasn’t a trace of Sample 681 left anywhere.

The locals who settled this area would have experienced the lightning striking this particular piece of mountain. Maybe they had explored the cave, but seeing the corpse had persuaded them to leave the site alone. But Dillman came along, a field geologist who, if he was anything like Mercer, would take local lore and custom into account when prospecting. He figured there was something underground attracting an inordinate amount of lightning, and he came in to investigate. Mercer didn’t know if Dillman had cleared it all out in one trip, or taken a few samples and only returned later when it was found the crystals had real value. Either way, Mercer thought as he slashed his light back and forth one last time, Dillman had been very thorough in cleaning out the cache of crystal gems. The bastard. Mercer had quickly developed a distinct dislike for the old prospector. Mercer was decades if not a century or more too late.

His light rested on the macabre remains of the long-dead mystic. The cave was too tight for someone to have dragged the body down here and set it in its current tableau, so the swami had come down to accept death willingly. Mercer wasn’t too sure of the rites of Buddhists or Jains, but he didn’t think suicide like this was strictly forbidden like it was in Islam or Christianity. He considered the spiritual and physical path this man must have taken to reach this point. He would have seen the mountain take strike after strike every time the sky opened up with bolts of blue fire. That had to have had some higher meaning to him, so the shaman came here to learn why this happened and decided this was such a sacred spot, a womb within the living rock, that he wanted it for his sepulcher. He had to recognize that it was the crystals that attracted the sky fire, so they were the real power here.

So what would he do? Just sit down and wait? Come here hoping to be struck by lightning?

“You wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, didn’t you?” Mercer said to the capsized corpse. “And to make sure that happened, I am willing to bet…”

He let his voice trail off and examined the claw-like hands, fully expecting to see the spindly fingers curled around one of the crystals, but they were empty. He swore, sure that he’d been right, and then another thought struck him. Fighting both revulsion and the returning nausea brought on by the altitude, he pried open the disarticulated skull’s locked jaw. Bits of desiccated flesh and skin sloughed off in disgusting flakes. The teeth were loose and a couple dropped out as Mercer prodded, but his fingers found purchase on something that would have been held trapped under the tongue, which was now nothing more than a scaly sac that crumbled to powder.

Mercer’s hand returned from its repulsive quest, and into the yellow beam of his flashlight came a nub of crystal the size of an acorn that was the same color, and had the same lifeless dinginess, as a ball of mud. He couldn’t help but feel a little disappointment. For no other reason than that treasures are always supposed to dazzle the eye, he’d expected something magical and exquisite, something with the fire of a diamond, or the mystery of a ruby or the spellbinding depth of an emerald. This stone made even the dimmest smoke quartz look luminous.

He decided right there that Dillman had taken just a small amount of this unlikely gem with him and only returned when told it had value, most likely by Herbert Hoover, and probably on his orders.

Studying the uninteresting lump, Mercer also deduced that Sample 681, the piece Abe had died for, was probably from that first foray into these mountains, but then wondered what happened to the lion’s share of the crystals after Dillman came back and wrested them from the geode.

“Shit,” he muttered in the empty echo of the chamber. He’d come here to solve one mystery and ended up with another, and one that might well not have a solution because the trail had gone as cold and as dead as the shaman staring at him from his ridiculous stiffened position. Mercer quickly righted the mummified mystic so that he could face eternity without his butt half in the air and then plucked a waterproof digital camera from his bag. He used crisp dollar bills as a reference by placing one on the floor of the geode and sticking another to a wall with a bit of chewing gum and snapped the better part of two hundred pictures. There was a photo interpretation business he knew outside of Washington that did a lot of work with the National Reconnaissance Office and would be able to stitch the pics together to form a three-dimensional composite of the chamber and extrapolate its exact volume. In this way he would know how many pounds of crystal Dillman had removed.

For now, though, his goal was to run a battery of tests on the sample he did have. He slipped the lump of cloudy crystal into a plastic baggie. Sealed it. Slipped that into another, sealed that one, and then finally slipped it into a third before stuffing it into a zippered pocket.

He exited the way he had entered, crawling like a commando on his elbows and the outsides of his boots, slithering inch by inch but mindful of the dust. The initial burst of adrenaline had long since worn off. His head pounded and his mouth felt stuffed with cotton. Using just the flashlight Mercer couldn’t tell how much his vision was diminished, but the pressure behind his eyes told him it was fading fast. And he was bone-achingly exhausted. He knew that if he paused for a second while lying on the cave floor he’d be asleep before he could stop himself.

Contemplating the slog out of the mountains drained him even further.

When the cave opened up enough for him to stand, he clicked off his light. Outside, the sky remained murky as more storm clouds moved through the valleys. Mercer heard the distant rumble of thunder, and he purposely touched the crystal nestled in his pocket. He wondered how attractive to lightning it really was.

He clicked his climbing harness onto the rope and gave the line a tug to warn the others he was coming back. He got a quick tug in reply. By the gray-faced TAG Heuer he’d worn for twenty years, he saw he’d been inside the cave for forty minutes. Sykes would be anxious.

He started climbing back across the cliff, certain that the security team would be shortening the line every few minutes to keep him properly belayed.

Another crump of thunder sounded, an odd echoing clap that hit concussively. Suddenly Mercer heard Booker Sykes shout, “Incoming!”

It wasn’t thunder, but the hollow whomp of a mortar round being fired from somewhere out in the valley.

Mercer turned to look and saw a puff of smoke being shredded by the wind several hundred yards away. That momentary reflex — to find the source of the danger — cost him his perch on the slick rock. With an irreversible drop, Mercer fell and his body pendulumed at the end of the safety line, arcing across the stone so quickly it was all he could do to keep his legs pedaling and stop himself from getting smeared against the cliff. Above him came the ferocious response to the mortar shot from Sykes and his team. They poured a massive amount of lead down the valley even before the mortar finished its parabola and exploded to the right and below the team.

Mercer came to the end of his Tarzan-like swing along the cliff and twisted quickly before he started arcing back. Rather than let gravity do the work, this time he pushed himself hard, knowing he was as inviting a target as a metal duck at a shooting gallery. From below came another blast from the mortar, followed by the mechanical crash of Kalashnikovs joining the fray. Hooded fighters emerged from cover and started firing. Each long pull on the AKs’ triggers blew a jet of flame that looked like rocket exhaust in the dishwater-gray pre-storm light.

The protective detail ducked as the second mortar round came arrowing in, landing much closer as the crew zeroed on their target. The next round would land right where the men defended the ridge and Mercer’s anchor point.

With adrenaline once again beating back the symptoms of altitude sickness, Mercer raced across the front of the cliff with the buzz of bullets swarming around him. Bits of rock exploded off the wall when struck by the copper-jacketed rounds, and stung like wasp strikes. He could feel the momentum running out of his arc as he neared its apogee, and he pushed harder, pounding his feet into the rock to gain precious inches, his hand outstretched, and his fingers touching but not finding purchase on the lip of stone ringing the cave.

Like a cat, Mercer reversed himself. As bullets peppered the cliff he ran flat out across its face once again, punishing the safety rope as it chafed against the stone where it was anchored. Sykes and the others tried to provide cover fire as best they could, but twenty native fighters were shooting up from the valley below; no matter how accurate the team was, the Afghanis continued to advance.

The mortar popped again, and this time the Americans had no choice but to abandon their position. The round would likely be coming in for a direct hit.

Mercer was forced to swing back again when the line came up hard against his climbing harness, and for a second attempt he ran across the cliff face at the cave entrance, shouting incoherently, his entire focus on making it to its relative safety. He was almost there when the mortar round impacted with a deafening blast, directly where Sykes had tied him off to a slab of rock. Stone chips and smoke boiled into the air.

Mercer paid no attention to the distraction, and stretched himself like an outfielder going for a pop-up. He had built up so much momentum in his headlong plunge that he was able to hook one forearm into the cave, followed by the other. Mercer fought until he pulled his lower body onto the outer lip of the cavern floor. When he glanced up the cliff face, he beheld a terrifying sight. The thousand-pound anchor boulder was now tumbling from its perch, starting to bounce down the cliff, his nylon line still knotted around its bulk. Mercer only had seconds. His hands were stiff from the cold and hurting from the climb, and yet they flew toward the steel carabiner on his belt. The boulder streaking past the cave opening would tear him from his perch, tossing him bodily down to the valley floor below. With a click the D link opened and was torn from his hands so violently by the plummeting stone that it ripped off his right glove.

Mercer rolled backward, into deeper cover. With his lungs pumping and his heart pounding in his chest, he was on such an adrenaline high that for a giddy moment he actually laughed at the fluke of his escape. Just one quarter second more and he would have been hurled down the mountain.

Bullets from the phalanx of Kalashnikovs continued to buzz and zip all around him, some pinging off the stone and vanishing farther down the cave. He slid back until they were no longer a threat. Several mortar rounds exploded near the entrance and filled the cavern with dust.

Mercer was safe for the moment, but he also knew he was trapped. Equally disturbing, the presence of the mortar told him these men had lain in ambush and waited until Mercer emerged from the cave in order to catch them all off guard. It was only Sykes’s quick counterfire that bought Mercer the time to find cover, and his bodyguards a chance to escape. Mercer figured his team would seek high ground and a more defensible position, but the large number of attackers meant eventually they would have to withdraw.

And that left him on his own. The Afghanis knew where he was. These were mountain people who could wait out an enemy for years if necessary. Mercer knew his odds of climbing down undetected were virtually zero, so if he didn’t find a way out of this mess quickly, he was going to die in this desolate corner of the globe. The world’s anus, indeed.

He really hated Michael Dillman now.

Mercer stayed low and moved deeper into the mountain, abandoning his pack but keeping his camera’s memory card and the sample when the cavern walls tightened. The ping and whine of ricochets died off to silence, and the mortar, too, had gone quiet. The Taliban or smugglers or whoever they were didn’t have any targets for the moment. He dropped to his knees and began crawling, and then down to his belly to slither when the tunnel constricted further. He passed the spot where Dillman had hit his head. His stomach was knotting up again and his headache was back. His eyesight was narrowing so that a gray halo ringed everything in view, and the halo was growing darker and thicker with each passing minute. On this second trip through the tunnel, however, Mercer noticed evidence that lightning had streaked through the passage, for the walls showed blackened char lines that ran up toward the geode chamber.

He needed a fraction of the time to reach the cave’s terminus this trip, and he didn’t waste precious moments looking at anything other than the collapsed part of the ceiling that had given way after aeons of being struck by lightning. Mercer felt the air blowing down the shaft from the surface. The going would be tight, but for the first ten or so feet he could see he had enough room to maneuver his body. He hoisted himself onto the heap of loose stone, some slabs as large as automobiles, and reached up and found a handhold just above the ceiling level. Mercer pulled himself up, kicking his feet into the rock to find traction. He pressed his back to the side of the chimney and reached up for another handhold, which broke off in his fingers. He dropped it and groped for another. He pried away several more weak stones before finding one he could use to haul himself up another couple of feet.

At times, the path shaped by the unimaginable force of lightning was so tortured and twisted he had to bend like a contortionist to keep climbing. At others, the chimney tightened so it felt like he had to dislocate a shoulder to work it through. If there was any saving grace, the air was fresher the higher he went, and while it didn’t contain much additional oxygen, even an extra little bit gave him strength.

Mercer could discern the pain of his body being pushed too far. Below him, dislodged pieces of stone rattled and pinged as he forged a path up the chimney. When he finally spotted daylight, Mercer could hardly believe his eyes. He was sure the climb would take much longer, and yet the evidence was right above him. The sky was the color of old pewter, but it had never looked better. He fought and clawed those last feet, straining to pull himself from the ground’s cloying embrace.

A moment later, all his enthusiasm vanished. It was as if fate had played the cruelest trick. Above him, the very top of the chimney reduced to a hole smaller than his head. A raccoon might have been able to squeeze through it, or maybe a young child, but there was no way a man his size would ever climb free.

Mercer wanted to scream with frustration, and he felt himself sag in the narrow space. With no energy remaining, he wondered if he would become lodged in this tight passageway, unable to free himself.

Mercer took a deep breath, and when he looked up he saw a crack along one edge of the hole. He reached up and worked one finger into it, and then a second. Mercer heaved at the crack, and a small piece crumbled like a rotten tooth. Erosion had weakened the rock, so it had become friable like sandstone. He clawed until more chunks of stone fell away below him, and he was able to wriggle one arm and part of his shoulder out of the hole.

That’s when he saw a man pass just beyond a nearby clump of shrubbery. Mercer couldn’t be sure in the uncertain light if the man was friend or foe. The man was armed, but it was impossible to see whether the weapon had the distinctive banana clip of an AK, or the boxier magazine for the M-4s. Mercer watched him for a moment and realized the silhouetted figure was stalking another man who was even farther away, and who was angled so that he would never see the approaching hunter.

He had seconds to react, but no idea what to do. He could end up saving one of his own, or giving them all away. He worked his arm back underground and popped the flap for his holster. He thumbed off the Beretta’s safety even as he yanked it back out of the earth.

The distant figure didn’t move. The stalker was coming at an angle. Mercer decided a warning shot would be the best he could do, and hope his guy had better reflexes than the Afghani.

A wave of altitude-induced pain passed through Mercer’s skull, and in its wake he had an instant of clearer vision. He saw the stalker was pulling a knife and that his target’s face was too uniformly black for it to be mere shadow.

Mercer drew down his pistol and fired, the bullet taking the Taliban in the throat. The pistol crack echoed for a brief second before the air erupted in the deadly chorus of another firefight.

Sykes whirled, not seeing Mercer, who was half in and half out of the ground, but he must have spotted another target because his assault rifle came up and he cooked off a three-round burst before dropping to a knee behind some rocks. Tracer fire carved slashing lines through the mist.

Desperate now because he was as much a target as he’d been earlier on the cliff, Mercer fought to free himself. He kicked and pried at the loose stone, chipping away at his rocky prison, until without warning great chunks of earth broke away and the chimney collapsed under him. Had he not lunged for the trunk of a hardscrabble tree, he would have plummeted back down the chute. Mercer pulled himself the rest of the way out of the ground, and found he was ringed by shrubbery, in a depression that had been blasted out by the highly charged onslaught of a million years’ worth of lightning.

Twenty yards away, Booker checked out the figure through the scope mounted on his rifle. He let the barrel drop when he realized it was Mercer, ragged and covered in dirt, who had somehow materialized like a zombie crawling out of his own grave to kill Sykes’s stalker.

Sykes caught Mercer’s eye and motioned to him, then laid down cover fire for Mercer to make a break for the rocks. Mercer didn’t waste the opportunity, although his vision was so poor from darkness and altitude sickness that he tripped over a root and went crashing to the ground just shy of the rocks. Sykes had to haul him the rest of the way by his belt.

“Someday you’ll have to explain how you managed to outflank us,” Book said. Mercer could see that the other team members were positioned to cover each other, even if he couldn’t tell which of Sykes’s Seven Dwarfs was which.

Mercer gave in to a tearing coughing fit that left him pale and shaking and spitting pink saliva. “Proverbial bad penny. What’s the situation?”

“Thirty Talibs ambushed our ass,” Sykes said, watching for movement out in the murk. Rain fell in a light haze that swayed with the wind like silvery gossamer. “We got lucky their mortar wasn’t zeroed dead nuts or we’d have been swatted like flies.”

“The chopper?”

“Airborne but it’s too hot and too rugged here. We need to break off and run like hell.”

Mercer opened his mouth to tell his friend that he was in no condition to run like hell or any other way, when a lightning bolt shot out of the storm and hit fifty yards away, splitting a gnarled tree in a burst of fire and blue arcing strands of pure electricity. The boom of thunder hit like a cannon shot and came almost instantly. The air filled with the stench of ozone, and a fighter still clutching his AK staggered out from behind the tree, a smoldering hole in the back of his jacket showing where the bolt had entered his body. A bloody stump where his hand had been was the exit. He fell dead before any of the Americans could take aim.

Seconds later another crooked fork of lightning blasted from the sky, landing a little farther away but producing a ball of seared plasma that raced across the ground like a top, swaying and dancing but always coming closer. It hit a stunted pine tree and vanished in a blaze of singed needles.

Mercer realized what was happening and knew he had seconds to find a solution, or risk killing them all. It was at that moment he remembered the copper box next to the ruined cloud chamber in the Leister Deep Mine, and understood its function. Fishing into his pocket he shouted to Sykes because he knew he had been deafened by the thunder and was sure Sykes had been too. “Give me an ammo clip.”

Booker Sykes had temporarily lost his hearing in enough firefights to have developed the ability to read lips to a limited degree. His vocabulary was little more than oaths of varying intensity and simple military-themed expressions. Mercer happened to hit on one of the latter, and Book pulled a magazine from a chest pouch and tossed it over, never wondering why Mercer would need ammo to a gun he didn’t carry.

Mercer caught the clip and began thumbing the slender 5.56mm bullets onto the ground next to where he crouched. The Taliban fighters recovered from the initial shock of the two lightning strikes and the gruesome death of their man, and renewed firing.

Once he had a pile of shining brass cartridges, Mercer pulled out a field dressing pack from his pocket, and tore it open with his teeth. He scooped up a handful of shells and dumped them onto the dressing. Then he added the lump of crystal and covered it with the rest of the brass shells. He bundled it all together, making sure the dull bit of brown gemstone was completely covered by the ammunition.

The principle was simple; he just didn’t know if the physics were the same. He had constructed a Faraday cage around the crystal shard, in order to negate its bizarre electric potential. In theory, the conductivity of the zinc and copper in the brass shell casings should shield the crystal from the lightning that seemed to seek it out, or at the least make the surrounding trees a more appealing conduit. Abe had shielded his original sample in a hinged copper box. He must have discarded the wax paper before leaving his office, after stuffing packing peanuts or bubble wrap around the crystal for its journey to Minnesota.

Mercer used surgical tape to secure the bundle and thrust the whole ball inside his shirtfront.

Another blast of lightning hit close enough to energize all the hairs on his body and make it feel as though every inch of his skin were covered with crawling insects. The accompanying thunder was too much for one of the assaulting Afghan fighters. He broke cover a hundred yards off and started running for the trail to take him back into the valley below the cave. They let him go.

“You good?” Sykes shouted over the ringing in Mercer’s ears.

He nodded. He had no choice. As awful as he felt, he couldn’t give in, not yet. Not this close. Sykes made some hand gestures to the others and en masse they opened fire in a deliberate attempt to engulf the assault force in sheer weight of shot. Before the last clip ran dry, Booker grabbed Mercer by the upper arm, and together they ran back, away from the valley. Seconds later the others would be following, but they would pause every dozen paces and provide covering fire to slow the Taliban’s advance, in this way letting Book, and their client, clear the area.

Mercer’s lungs were on fire, and each breath brought up flecks of bloody saliva that ran unnoticed down his chin. His legs were unsteady as well, and without Book practically holding him up he would have collapsed into the dust. Book’s meaty hand was digging into Mercer’s arm, taking so much of his weight that Mercer felt like a child. Behind them the sound of autofire diminished, swallowed up by the storm. It seemed the threat of a deadly lightning strike had faded because bolts of twisting electricity were now passing harmlessly from cloud to cloud.

They moved forward, from tree to rock to shrub, finding cover wherever they could. They had to find someplace where Ahmad could set the chopper long enough for them to jump aboard, and that meant they needed distance from their pursuers. But the locals wouldn’t give up. They had the scent of blood in their nostrils now that the Americans had taken flight, and would run them to ground the way a jackal hunts a hare.

The lump of brass in his shirt bobbed painfully with each flagging footfall. Sykes was taking more and more of Mercer’s weight even as they slowed. Mercer’s body wasn’t getting the oxygen it needed to keep going. He never should have made it out of the cave, let alone covered more than a mile of uneven terrain, but he was quickly coming to the end. His muscles needed rich red blood to function, and his lungs couldn’t provide the needed oxygen.

They ran out from under the storm’s edge, the sky brightening enough for Mercer to see they had been running toward a prow-like promontory of rock that fell away several hundred feet on its three sides. They had raced into a dead end. That was why the Afghanis hadn’t pushed the pursuit too hard. They were merely shepherding their prey into a kill zone so they could mow them down in an orgy of hot brass and ruined flesh.

Ahmad must have been waiting for that exact moment, because he rounded a hilltop five miles off and started in for the only spot he could possibly land. Sykes knew they hadn’t opened a big enough lead, and that an RPG would blast the Mil from the sky the moment his pilot flared in for touchdown.

Sykes looked behind him. His three men were just emerging from the curtain of the storm. Sleep looked like he’d been hit because Sneeze had a shoulder under one arm and was helping him on. Grumpy had shouldered his sniper rifle, most likely because he was out of ammo, and fired at the unseen swarm of Taliban with his pistol, triggering off evenly spaced, almost unhurried shots that kept the advancing fighters back in the mist.

There were fifty or sixty yards of separation between Grump and the native fighters, and Ahmad determined it was the best he was going to get. He had kept the chopper screened by the mountain’s edge and a stand of trees that he’d had to peer through to see his people. He popped up when he thought he could do the most good, and as soon as the wheels cleared the tallest of the trees he fired the contents of a rocket pod attached to the chopper’s right side. A dozen unguided rockets almost as slender as arrows streaked just a few feet over the men’s heads and hit in a solid wall just in front of the tangos. The concussion knocked the three Americans to the ground, but the wall of fire and blooming vortices of dirt and smoke consumed half the shooters chasing after them.

Unseen behind the curtain of destruction, the remaining natives broke ranks and fled, not knowing the helicopter had fired its one and only weapon and was now defenseless.

Sleep, Sneeze, and Grump hauled themselves to their feet and ran while Ahmad came thundering in, the big Mi-2 kicking up a maelstrom of dust that rivaled the rocket explosions. Sykes all but carried Mercer the last twenty yards and tossed him bodily into the chopper before turning and motioning his men to push it even harder. Sneeze dumped the injured Sleep into the chopper and Book was yelling at the pilot to take off even as Grump, the last man, was still being dragged through the door.

In all it took just seconds. Ahmad threw the helo into the air and as soon as the wheels cleared the ridge, he dropped it down into the next valley, using gravity to build up speed in order to get as far away from the scene as possible.

Sykes grabbed a supplemental oxygen bottle from stores kept in a bin behind the pilot seat, fitted the mouthpiece over Mercer’s face, and turned the tap on full. Within just a few seconds, Mercer started feeling the effects. His chest still heaved and his head felt like it had split open, but nowhere near as badly. After a minute he was back from death’s door…and just felt like he had the worst hangover of his life.

Sykes had turned his attention to his wounded man. Sleep had taken a round to the thigh that hadn’t hit the femoral artery, but it would require surgery to remove. The men had it bandaged and pumped him with morphine over his protests. Only when Book was satisfied they were all okay did he look back at Mercer and finally ask, “What was all that voodoo with the lightning?”

“Hell if I know.” Mercer pulled the oxygen mask from his mouth. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, but I think that phenomenon is what this whole thing’s all about.”