Nothing happened. Well, one thing happened: the rip cord broke off in my hand.
A few seconds later I was yanked about fifty feet straight up as my chute deployed and my descent slowed—but didn’t seem slow enough. At least I was falling feetfirst. I could see one or two other OIPEP troopers silhouetted against the sky, dangling from their chutes like the toys I used to buy—the green army men with the plastic parachutes that you threw underhanded into the air. Half the time the kite string didn’t unravel correctly and the army man crashed to earth or got hung up in a tree branch.
I looked down between my feet and saw the desert rushing up. Bend your knees, Kropp, keep ’em loose, I told myself, but I smacked into the ground with my legs as stiff as one of those army men’s. My right ankle twisted in the sand. I pitched forward and the chute settled gently over my writhing body, the silky material wrapping tighter and tighter around me as I rolled in the sand.
Somebody pulled the chute off me and rolled me over. I looked up into Ashley’s face—her red lipstick looked purple in the starlight—and said, “I think I broke my right ankle.”
“Let’s see,” she said softly. She ran her fingers along the bones and then took my foot in both hands and gently turned it.
“Ouch!”
“I think it’s a sprain. Let’s see if you can put any weight on it.”
She unhooked me from the harness and pulled me to my feet.
“Put your foot on the ground, Alfred,” she said.
“Ouch!”
About a hundred feet away the agents were busy with the crates—or what was left of them. They had broken apart on impact; slats lay scattered in every direction.
Op Nine came up, frowning.
“Kropp is hurt?” he asked.
“Not badly,” Ashley said. “A sprain, I think.”
Op Nine said to Ashley, “Kropp rides with you.”
He trudged toward the other agents gathered around the remnants of the crates. We trailed behind, my arm draped over Ashley’s neck, my foot dragging in the sand. In every direction dunes marched like oceanic waves, disappearing into the horizon. I had thought the stars very bright on the shores of the Red Sea, but here in the desert they seared the blackness around them.
“Where exactly are we, anyway?” I asked Ashley.
“The Sahara.”
The agents had pulled twelve snowmobiles from the shattered crates and were going down some kind of checklist, getting them ready, I guess, only there wasn’t much chance of a snowstorm in the desert. One agent was handing out the CW3XDs and clip belts that they threw over their shoulders, reminding me of Mexican bandits. Abby Smith stood by herself a few feet away, holding some electronic gadget with a bluish LCD glimmering on her frowning face.
“What’s the deal with the snowmobiles?” I asked.
“They aren’t snowmobiles,” Ashley replied. “Well, they used to be. They’ve been modified. We call them sand-foils.”
Instead of the ski pads, these had thin metal blades, the sharp edge facing down. Someone handed Ashley a helmet and she passed it to me.
“Put this on, Alfred. A sand-foil’s top speed is a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Do you know what a single grain of sand can do if it hits you at that speed?”
“No, but I got hit with a baseball once that must have been going forty miles per hour; it hurt like heck.”
I shoved the helmet down over my head. I could have guessed it would be too small, and it was. One of my ears was folded down.
Abby snapped her device closed and trudged over to us.
“We’re approximately a hundred clicks due east of the target,” she said crisply. Her voice sounded very far away inside my helmet. “Remember, no wake-riding and no unauthorized firing of the 3XDs. Op Nine and I are on the point. Any questions?”
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.