'I've got visual confirmation of a second group,' Osman called over the headset band. 'Smaller... maybe fifty individuals.'
'Close with them but keep an eye on the floor.' Ayaan had a pair of field glasses in her hand. They had been designed to provide night vision but the batteries had died years before. They still worked as binoculars in broad daylight. Her voice turned to ice cubes slithering out of a pitcher. 'There.'
Sarah moved forward hand over hand, grabbing at the nylon loops sewed into the headrests of the crew seats. In the cockpit of the Mi-8 she could look down through the chin bubble and see what Ayaan was talking about. About fifty people'almost all of them dead'were laboring up the side of a sand dune below her. Most of them were tugging on thick lines, dragging a flatbed rail car kitted out with enormous balloon tires. On its back crouched a kind of tent, maybe a yurt, while ghouls chained to the flatbed turned enormous cranks while living men crewed .50 caliber machine guns rigged up in universal mounts.
The flap of the yurt fell back and someone emerged from the shadowy interior. Then something happened to the light in the helicopter, to Sarah's eyes, to her... other senses.
Though she was still five hundred meters away Sarah could make out his features perfectly. She felt as if she were looking through binoculars, though she wasn't. He was a boy'shorter even than herself, maybe ten or twelve years old. He was astonishingly beautiful.
His skin was so white it stood out bluish in the desert sun. His complexion was perfectly clear, his hair a pale gold lighter than his skin. His large, soulful eyes smoldered with blue flame. He wore the armor of a medieval warrior, scaled down to fit his frame and enameled in glossy black then worked with a motif of bones and creeping vines. He carried a scepter in his right hand topped with a bleached human skull. Sapphires winked from its dark eye sockets.
He looked right at Sarah. Not just in her direction but right at her, making perfect eye contact. Which was when she realized something was wrong.
'Grab something, ladies,' Osman called just as he swung the Mi-8 around. The machine guns mounted on the flatbed blasted tracer fire through the air, yellow sparks that arced up and tried to touch the aircraft. Fathia leapt up out of her seat even as the bullets tore past so close Sarah was dazzled by their flickering light. The soldier started yanking assault rifles down from the rack at the front of the cargo bay and tossing them to her squad mates. Ayaan unstrapped herself and picked up the oilcloth bundle of her own weapon. The same AK-47 she'd carried since she had left school.
Osman had never impressed Sarah before by displaying courage but he didn't shrink from Ayaan's orders'perhaps the two of them shared some secret reason for acting so irrationally. The pilot opened up the copter's throttle and pushed forward on the yoke, throwing the Mi-8 right at the flatbed with all the power the dual powerplants could muster. Soldiers leaned out of the crew door and the rear loading ramp, secured from a deadly fall to the sands below only by their safety lines, and the air in the helicopter vibrated with the noise of their weapons discharging again and again and again. As quickly as that they were in the midst of battle.