Nobody had any questions or, if they did, they weren’t going to waste time asking them. All the agents except Ashley flipped the big CW3XDs onto their backs. Ashley had to ride with hers awkwardly resting across her chest, since she had my big self awkwardly clinging to her back. Static popped in my ear and suddenly her purry voice seemed to enter my head and lodge in the middle of my brain. The helmets were outfitted with a wireless setup.
“You okay?”
“I guess.”
She pressed a button on the console in front of her and indicator lights blinked on. I didn’t hear the engine roar to life like I expected; the thing simply started to vibrate beneath me.
“Hang on!” she said. I wrapped my arms around her waist as the sand-foil leaped forward and accelerated, the blades rising out of the sand as it gained speed. These sand-foils were clearly not made for two riders. My butt hung about halfway off the back of the leather seat and I worried about a stray grain of sand embedding itself into the softest part of my body.
Looking over her shoulder, I could see the speedometer. The needle hovered just below the one hundred mark.
Abigail Smith had said we were due east of the target, which meant we must have been heading west, but the dunes ran roughly north-south, so our race across the Sahara was run half of the time in the air, as we crested one wave, became airborne, and then smacked back down in a trough before starting up the next dune.
The ride across the desert was like being on a roller coaster. Those rides always seemed to last longer than they really were. I raised my head and looked over Ashley’s shoulder.
The other agents had already stopped. Straight ahead the horizon glowed a brilliant amber with little sparks flying around in the orange like sunlight reflecting off the tips of waves.
We slowed to a stop and I slipped off, fumbling with the chin straps of my helmet. I yanked it off, wincing as it scraped over my ears. I could see Op Nine standing a few yards in front of the rest of the group, studying the glowing horizon like he’d never seen a sunrise before.
“What’s up?” I asked Ashley, but she just shook her head. I trudged through the sand toward Op Nine, dragging my bum foot. The glow on the horizon had deepened to an orangish red. But something about this desert sunrise wasn’t right, and it took me the rest of the hike to figure it out: we were facing west, not east.
This was no sunrise.
Abby Smith was a few steps ahead of me and Op Nine must have heard her coming up, because she was still behind him when he turned his head and spoke.
And now the glow on the horizon looked like a wall of fire coming toward us.
“We are too late.”
18
“How many?” Abby asked Op Nine.
“It’s difficult . . .” He shaded his eyes with one huge hand and squinted toward the sparkling light. “Thirty, perhaps forty legions.”
“Legions?” I asked. “What’s a legion?”
Abby said to him, “Not all, then.”
He shook his head. “A search party.”
“A search party of what?” I asked.
“Can we outrun them?” she asked.
He said quietly, “ ‘Their horses are swifter than leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat.’ ”
“I’ll take that as a no,” she said. “Then we engage.” She started to turn away. He grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
“No!” he said in a fierce whisper. “Our mission is to acquire the target. There is still time.”
“Time for what?” I asked, but I really didn’t expect an answer by this point.
Now the orange on the horizon had deepened to a fiery red mixed with bright white sparks. The stars winked out as the burning light advanced, filling the night sky, and a breeze noticeably warmer than the cool desert air began to blow across our faces.
“We must take cover,” Op Nine said. “Immediately.”
Abby turned and started toward the others, making some kind of complicated hand signal as she went, and right away they opened the storage compartments on the foils and began pulling out what looked like brown tarps.
Op Nine had said we needed to take cover immediately, but he didn’t move a muscle. He stood stock-still and stared at the flickering lights of white and gold. The breeze had turned into a full-fledged wind that grew hotter with each passing second. The ground started to tremble.
“Uh, Op Nine, didn’t you say we had to take cover?”
He shook his head as if rousing himself from a dream.
“Yes. Come, Kropp.”
He threw my arm over his shoulder and helped me back to the foils. The agents had spread the brown tarps over the vehicles and now were crawling underneath them. Ashley crouched beside one, motioning to us.
“Alfred,” Op Nine said. “This is very important: do not look into their eyes. They will know what you fear.”
He lowered me to the ground and I started to crawl under the tarp. He grabbed my arm and pulled my face close to his.
“And what you love.”
He had to shout over the wind, which was howling by this point, spraying us with stinging grains of sand. He let the tarp fall and I felt someone’s hand on my wrist, pulling me away from the edge.
“Don’t move,” Ashley whispered. “Don’t talk.”
The darkness under the tarp faded, or maybe I was getting used to it, because after a minute I could see her bright blue eyes darting back and forth. Ashley’s hand was white-knuckled on the CW3XD that lay across her lap, her index finger caressing the trigger. Ashley was afraid.
The tarp rippled and snapped around us as the gale worsened and sand popped against the material, making this strange hissing sound like gas escaping from a bottle. I could hear something else too, as if the wind was a curtain rippling as this sound passed behind it. Voices, or maybe not voices but somehow the echo of voices, and I started to shake as the tarp around us began to glow red.
It was very close now, whatever it was, and the closer it got, the more I shook. It was hot and stuffy under the covering and I was sweating, but I shivered like I had a fever. Op Nine’s warning echoed over and over in my head: Don’t look into their eyes! Don’t look into their eyes! My mind became like a slice of Swiss cheese, stretched thin, full of holes filled with darkness, and that darkness was full of horror.