Kara gazed out. “I still don’t under—”
Directly before them, a wall of sand blew up from below the mesa’s edge. They all fell back.
“A nisnase!” Lu’lu gasped.
The whirlwind formed just beyond the mesa, swirling in a sinuous column. Both Kara and the hodja retreated for the passage. Safia remained where she stood, mesmerized.
Vast waves of static charge swept up its length, chasing up from the sand and into the sky. Her cloak billowed, not from winds this time, but from the play of electricity in the air, crackling over her skin, clothes, and hair. It was a painful but somehow ecstatic feeling. It left her body cold, her skin warm.
She exhaled, not realizing she had been holding her breath.
She took a step forward, close enough to see the full breadth of the snaking whirlwind. Energy continued to jitter through the column. She saw the devil centered around one of the three vehicles. From her vantage point, she could see the sands around the truck forming a whirlpool beneath it.
She jumped a bit when something touched her elbow. It was Kara. She had strengthened her nerve to watch. Kara found and took Safia’s hand. In her touch, Safia sensed Kara reliving an old nightmare.
Beneath the truck, the sands began to darken. A burning odor wafted up to them. Kara’s hand clenched on Safia. She had recognized that smell.
The sands grew black. Molten sand. Glass.
The nisnase.
The energies in the whirlwind whipped wildly, glowing through the entire column. From their perch, they watched the truck sink into the molten pool, at first slowly, its rubber tires melting and popping—then there was a tremendous whoosh of static, the devil collapsed, and in the instant before it vanished, Safia watched the glass turn as black as nothingness. The truck fell away, as if through air. The black pit melted deeper into the sand, and the last winds swept fresh sand over it, wiping away all trace.
A ghost come and gone.
A moment later, a soft blast burped. The sand in the area bumped up.
“Fuel tank,” Kara said.
They both raised their eyes. More of the deadly whirlwinds were popping up all over. There had to be a dozen of them now.
“What’s happening?” Kara asked.
Safia shook her head. The encircling wall of storm had also grown blacker, contracting toward them, moving closer in all directions.
Lu’lu stared around them with a look of terror. “The other storm system from the coast. It has come, the two are feeding on each other, becoming something worse.”
“The megastorm,” Safia said. “It’s forming around us.”
More and more whirlwinds danced across the sands. Their glows were flames rising from the sands. It was a hellish landscape. The storm beyond grew blacker and wilder. It screamed now.
To move across those sands invited certain death.
Safia heard a sound closer at hand. A noise from her radio. She freed it from a pocket. Omaha had asked her to leave the channel open in case he needed to reach her.
She fished it out and backed toward the passageway.
A voice whispered through static at her. “Safia…if…can hear me…”
Kara leaned next to her. “Who is it?”
Safia pressed it to her ear, listening tightly.
“…I…coming…Safia, can you hear…”
“Who?” Kara asked.
Safia’s eyes widened. “It’s Painter. He’s alive.”
Some vagary of the storm’s static let his voice reach her clearly for a moment. “I’m two miles from your position. Hold tight. I’m coming.”
Static erased any further reception.
Safia pressed the send button and held the radio to her lips. “Painter, if you can hear me, don’t come! Do not come! Did you hear me?”
She released the button. Only static. He hadn’t heard.
She stared out at the netherworld of storm, fire, and wind.
It was death to travel those sands…and Painter was coming here.
6:05 P.M.
C ASSANDRA CROUCHED with two of her men. Gunfire rattled and spat all around. After the first RPG blast had caught her off guard, Cassandra had entered the fray, moving into the wreck and tumble of the town.
Fighting continued, but her team was making steady progress.
She stared through the sights of a rifle and waited. The cluster of blocky homes lay before her, limned in shades of emerald and silver through her night-vision goggles. Having also employed an overlay of infrared, she watched a red blob move beyond a glass wall, near a corner. One of the enemy.
She studied the silhouette. Her target carried a tube on his shoulder, blazing like a small sun. Fiery hot. One of the launchers. She had instructed her men to focus their attention on such objectives. They had to eliminate the enemy’s long-range capabilities.
By the wall, her target shifted, moving out into the open, positioning the grenade launcher.
Cassandra centered her crosshairs on the hottest part of the enemy’s body—the head. She squeezed her trigger. Just once. That’s all she needed.
Through the infrared, she saw the spray of fire blossom outward.
A clean shot.
But some twitched reflex fired the launcher.
Cassandra watched the RPG blast away, blinding on her scopes. She rolled to her back, dazzled. The grenade sailed high overhead, the aim way off course, as the enemy’s body fell backward.
Angled toward the roof as the grenade was, she lost sight of it against the brilliant display of electrical discharges storming across the ceiling. She flipped away the infrared overlay and toggled off the night-vision mode. Through the regular lenses, the roof still blazed. The display had grown more violent, filling the entire cap of the dome. Small arcs of electricity speared out like bolts of lightning.
Across the lake, the misfired RPG exploded. It had struck the far wall, opposite the city. She focused the telescopic view.
Fuck…She could not catch a goddamn break.
The grenade struck the wall above the tunnel leading into the cavern. She watched a section of the glass wall tear away from the rock behind it, along with a portion of the tunnel room. It collapsed, sealing the tunnel.
Their exit was now blocked.
She rolled to her stomach. The surface team would just have to dig them out. The immediate concern was to secure this town, capture Safia, and extract the prize here. She flipped her infrared overlay back over her goggles’ lenses.
It was time to continue the hunt.
Her two men had gone forward already to check the body and confiscate the launcher. They were ready to move on.
Cassandra paused to check her electronic tracker.