This was exactly what Sarah wanted. The best available cover was a narrow cut in the mountain about half a mile back down the road behind him. It would be impossible to attack the defile effectively from the air. Sarah had spent most of a day burying remotely-detonated mines in the road surface there.
She was pretty proud of her strategy. It made a lot of logical sense. There was only one flaw in it.
'He hasn't changed course at all,' she said out loud when five minutes had passed. That was more than enough time for a retreat order to go down the chain of command. The flatbed still crawled forward. The dead'and the living'still clustered in its wake. They were sitting ducks. She could pick them off at her leisure.
'Did he bring them all this way just so I could kill them?' she demanded.
'He doesn't seem the type to cry over casualties,' Osman replied. She was glad somebody was talking to her. She looked back to the tail end of the crew compartment where Ptolemy stood waiting with a fresh SMAW for her. She chewed on her lip.
'He must know something I don't,' she announced. She leaned out of the crew door and studied the column once again. One machine gun position remained on the flatbed but nobody stood anywhere near it, nobody with hands. The living cultists down there had assault weapons but she could easily stay out of their range. The Tsarevich's yurt was on fire. That was something. As she watched, however, a group of cultists with fire extinguishers blasted it with white foam.
'Okay,' she said, uncertain of what else to do. 'Let's get ready for another attack.' Even as she said it though she heard something. The noise of the helicopter drowned out almost every sound but she heard another engine roaring, a gasoline engine. She looked down and saw an enormous truck gunning up the side of the road, looking like it might collide with the flatbed. It had flames painted on its doors and its exposed engine chugged and pistoned madly, belching pale, thin smoke out of half a dozen tailpipes.
Standing up in its cargo bed, a gorilla or maybe just a really hairy man lifted a long tube to his shoulder. Sarah recognized the rectangular plates mounted on its business end. It was a Stinger missile, an antiaircraft weapon.
The Tsarevich must have learned about repelling airborne attacks after the time Ayaan tried the same trick on him in Egypt. A pile of Stingers lay at the gorilla's feet.
'Dive!' she shouted, and Osman spun the helicopter into a banking descent so sharp she lost her footing and fell out of the crew door, her fall cut painfully short as her safety line snapped taut. 'Osman!' she screamed, dangling in mid-air three feet below the Jayhawk's belly. 'Osman!'
'I'm busy,' he shouted back.
The gorilla discharged his weapon. A silver line of smoke shot out of its muzzle. Osman dipped the helicopter over to one side but the Stinger was a guided missile and it was already locked on to the Jayhawk. As Sarah watched it rolled over in mid-flight and gimbaled around to track the helicopter's exhaust.
Osman dropped the helicopter again and Sarah bounced madly on the end of her line. With hands like claws she grabbed again and again, trying to grab the cord. The green pointy tops of the fir trees below came rushing up at her but'but'yes'she had one hand on the cord. She managed to pull herself up a fraction of an inch before the rolling helicopter knocked her loose again.
She could hear the Stinger coming. It cut through the air with a high-pitched sreech. Sarah grabbed the line with both hands and hauled herself up, her body flailing in the wind.
A dozen linen-wrapped hands reached down and grabbed her shoulders, her arms, her neck, even her ears. The mummies hauled her up and inside the helicopter moments before the belly of the Jayhawk started hissing and rattling, smacking aside the higher treetops. Osman dropped them another two feet and wood and pine needles exploded against the undercarriage. Everything smelled like sap.
Fifty yards behind them the Stinger's stabilizing fins tangled up in a mangled larch. The missile exploded in a brilliant cloud of fire and dark smoke. Osman tapped his yoke and the helicopter lifted up, out of the trees again.
'Alright, girl,' he said in her earphones. 'What in hell comes next?'
Monster Planet
Chapter Ten