Twenty yards away, Booker checked out the figure through the scope mounted on his rifle. He let the barrel drop when he realized it was Mercer, ragged and covered in dirt, who had somehow materialized like a zombie crawling out of his own grave to kill Sykes’s stalker.
Sykes caught Mercer’s eye and motioned to him, then laid down cover fire for Mercer to make a break for the rocks. Mercer didn’t waste the opportunity, although his vision was so poor from darkness and altitude sickness that he tripped over a root and went crashing to the ground just shy of the rocks. Sykes had to haul him the rest of the way by his belt.
“Someday you’ll have to explain how you managed to outflank us,” Book said. Mercer could see that the other team members were positioned to cover each other, even if he couldn’t tell which of Sykes’s Seven Dwarfs was which.
Mercer gave in to a tearing coughing fit that left him pale and shaking and spitting pink saliva. “Proverbial bad penny. What’s the situation?”
“Thirty Talibs ambushed our ass,” Sykes said, watching for movement out in the murk. Rain fell in a light haze that swayed with the wind like silvery gossamer. “We got lucky their mortar wasn’t zeroed dead nuts or we’d have been swatted like flies.”
“The chopper?”
“Airborne but it’s too hot and too rugged here. We need to break off and run like hell.”
Mercer opened his mouth to tell his friend that he was in no condition to run like hell or any other way, when a lightning bolt shot out of the storm and hit fifty yards away, splitting a gnarled tree in a burst of fire and blue arcing strands of pure electricity. The boom of thunder hit like a cannon shot and came almost instantly. The air filled with the stench of ozone, and a fighter still clutching his AK staggered out from behind the tree, a smoldering hole in the back of his jacket showing where the bolt had entered his body. A bloody stump where his hand had been was the exit. He fell dead before any of the Americans could take aim.
Seconds later another crooked fork of lightning blasted from the sky, landing a little farther away but producing a ball of seared plasma that raced across the ground like a top, swaying and dancing but always coming closer. It hit a stunted pine tree and vanished in a blaze of singed needles.
Mercer realized what was happening and knew he had seconds to find a solution, or risk killing them all. It was at that moment he remembered the copper box next to the ruined cloud chamber in the Leister Deep Mine, and understood its function. Fishing into his pocket he shouted to Sykes because he knew he had been deafened by the thunder and was sure Sykes had been too. “Give me an ammo clip.”
Booker Sykes had temporarily lost his hearing in enough firefights to have developed the ability to read lips to a limited degree. His vocabulary was little more than oaths of varying intensity and simple military-themed expressions. Mercer happened to hit on one of the latter, and Book pulled a magazine from a chest pouch and tossed it over, never wondering why Mercer would need ammo to a gun he didn’t carry.
Mercer caught the clip and began thumbing the slender 5.56mm bullets onto the ground next to where he crouched. The Taliban fighters recovered from the initial shock of the two lightning strikes and the gruesome death of their man, and renewed firing.
Once he had a pile of shining brass cartridges, Mercer pulled out a field dressing pack from his pocket, and tore it open with his teeth. He scooped up a handful of shells and dumped them onto the dressing. Then he added the lump of crystal and covered it with the rest of the brass shells. He bundled it all together, making sure the dull bit of brown gemstone was completely covered by the ammunition.
The principle was simple; he just didn’t know if the physics were the same. He had constructed a Faraday cage around the crystal shard, in order to negate its bizarre electric potential. In theory, the conductivity of the zinc and copper in the brass shell casings should shield the crystal from the lightning that seemed to seek it out, or at the least make the surrounding trees a more appealing conduit. Abe had shielded his original sample in a hinged copper box. He must have discarded the wax paper before leaving his office, after stuffing packing peanuts or bubble wrap around the crystal for its journey to Minnesota.
Mercer used surgical tape to secure the bundle and thrust the whole ball inside his shirtfront.
Another blast of lightning hit close enough to energize all the hairs on his body and make it feel as though every inch of his skin were covered with crawling insects. The accompanying thunder was too much for one of the assaulting Afghan fighters. He broke cover a hundred yards off and started running for the trail to take him back into the valley below the cave. They let him go.
“You good?” Sykes shouted over the ringing in Mercer’s ears.
He nodded. He had no choice. As awful as he felt, he couldn’t give in, not yet. Not this close. Sykes made some hand gestures to the others and en masse they opened fire in a deliberate attempt to engulf the assault force in sheer weight of shot. Before the last clip ran dry, Booker grabbed Mercer by the upper arm, and together they ran back, away from the valley. Seconds later the others would be following, but they would pause every dozen paces and provide covering fire to slow the Taliban’s advance, in this way letting Book, and their client, clear the area.
Mercer’s lungs were on fire, and each breath brought up flecks of bloody saliva that ran unnoticed down his chin. His legs were unsteady as well, and without Book practically holding him up he would have collapsed into the dust. Book’s meaty hand was digging into Mercer’s arm, taking so much of his weight that Mercer felt like a child. Behind them the sound of autofire diminished, swallowed up by the storm. It seemed the threat of a deadly lightning strike had faded because bolts of twisting electricity were now passing harmlessly from cloud to cloud.
They moved forward, from tree to rock to shrub, finding cover wherever they could. They had to find someplace where Ahmad could set the chopper long enough for them to jump aboard, and that meant they needed distance from their pursuers. But the locals wouldn’t give up. They had the scent of blood in their nostrils now that the Americans had taken flight, and would run them to ground the way a jackal hunts a hare.
The lump of brass in his shirt bobbed painfully with each flagging footfall. Sykes was taking more and more of Mercer’s weight even as they slowed. Mercer’s body wasn’t getting the oxygen it needed to keep going. He never should have made it out of the cave, let alone covered more than a mile of uneven terrain, but he was quickly coming to the end. His muscles needed rich red blood to function, and his lungs couldn’t provide the needed oxygen.
They ran out from under the storm’s edge, the sky brightening enough for Mercer to see they had been running toward a prow-like promontory of rock that fell away several hundred feet on its three sides. They had raced into a dead end. That was why the Afghanis hadn’t pushed the pursuit too hard. They were merely shepherding their prey into a kill zone so they could mow them down in an orgy of hot brass and ruined flesh.
Ahmad must have been waiting for that exact moment, because he rounded a hilltop five miles off and started in for the only spot he could possibly land. Sykes knew they hadn’t opened a big enough lead, and that an RPG would blast the Mil from the sky the moment his pilot flared in for touchdown.
Sykes looked behind him. His three men were just emerging from the curtain of the storm. Sleep looked like he’d been hit because Sneeze had a shoulder under one arm and was helping him on. Grumpy had shouldered his sniper rifle, most likely because he was out of ammo, and fired at the unseen swarm of Taliban with his pistol, triggering off evenly spaced, almost unhurried shots that kept the advancing fighters back in the mist.