by Toby Tate
* * *
Just as Cain had seen in his vision, someone had indeed been in his house. He could practically smell them. The fact that Sampson was gone was, of course, a dead giveaway. The anger simmered inside him as he stared at a list of recent items on his iMac—someone had opened Safari and found the sites he had visited going back over a year, including many of the ones concerning his project in the desert. Were they headed there now? How could they possibly know what he was doing or where it was located? Everyone closely connected with the project was under his parasitic control—or dead.
Then he remembered that “other” person, the one who had been inside his head. Was he leading them there somehow? Whoever this man or woman was, they needed to be dealt with.
He packed a suitcase and headed downstairs to the garage and his Range Rover. He had worked too long and too hard for this, and no force on earth or otherwise was going to stop him now.
* * *
They drove in silence for hours, and Gabe managed to find a couple of satellite radio stations that played American rock music. It only made her miss home that much more. If she never came back to the Middle East, she figured it would be too soon.
She led the small convoy along the coast on the Dubai Ghweifat International Highway, which the GPS said would eventually lead to Arrada Ghayathi al Ruwais Road and on to parts unknown. She glanced sideways at Abel. Could she really trust him? She still knew absolutely nothing about him, other than the fact he seemed to have all the same powers as Cain. That thought sent a chill through her body. She knew what the Lilitu were capable of, had seen the way they killed with impunity, the intense storms that they could conjure up out of nowhere, shooting lightning bolts in every direction, creating howling winds of more than one hundred thirty knots. And these two—Cain and Abel—they were two of a kind, weren’t they? Could the world withstand a war between them? Like the old Bible stories she had heard as a child, she hoped that Abel was indeed the good brother.
“Why do you think I’m doing all this?” Abel suddenly asked, pulling Gabe out of her thoughts. Was he reading her mind? He glanced over at her, his face grim.
“I don’t know what to think. So far, you seem to be on our side. But what if you’re just leading us into some kind of trap?”
“I know your experiences with my kind have been…unpleasant. But I have to ask you to have faith that my ultimate aim is for the good of mankind.”
“You keep asking me to have faith. My faith has always been with the blade of a knife or the barrel of a gun. My faith in the human race gave out long ago.”
“Then have faith in God.”
“Even if I believed in God, that doesn’t mean you’re his emissary or that you won’t go off on your own path.”
“No, but you know I love Lydia and would do anything for her. She believes in me. Why can’t you?”
There were a thousand different things Gabe wanted to say in answer to that, but she held her tongue. She glanced in the rear-view and saw Gordon staring at her, the ghost of a smile on his lips. What the hell was he thinking? Maybe he was playing it smart and keeping his mouth shut.
Maybe I should do the same.
Chapter Forty-Three
They had passed a couple of small settlements, several oil wells, and a hospital and finally came to a large Bedouin settlement called Ghayathi. A sign with the name written in English, a gigantic Arabian coffee pot sprouting from its top, stood by the roadway welcoming visitors. Gabe marveled that there was nothing but sand for miles and miles until they reached a populated area, then there seemed to be nothing but trees lining the roadway. In fact, next to the highway were acres and acres of lots with trees that local citizens could go and buy to plant in their own yards.
Come on down to Ahmed’s tree lot. We sell the best for less!
Gabe smiled at her joke as the radio crackled to life from the seat next to her.
“Let’s pull in at the gas station and use the little merc’s room,” Scooter’s voice said.
Gabe picked it up and pushed the talk-balk button. “Roger that,” she said as she eyed the big ADNOC sign looming in the distance. ADNOC, or Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, was the world’s fourth-largest oil company and the only gas station in Ghayathi. Some customers glanced their way when they pulled in with the big UNICAT in tow, but people in this area had gotten so used to seeing military-type vehicles, they didn’t look twice. At any given time, there were MRAPs, Humvees and armored personnel carriers driving around on their way to maneuvers taking place deep within the desert.
The sign pointed the way to Shopping/Food, Car Wash, Tyre Repair and a couple of other services. She followed the one that said Shopping/Food and pulled up outside the convenience store. The three of them went inside, Abel with his sunglasses on to hide his silver eyes. Gabe was pleased to see a Bon Food sign and a giant refrigerator filled with chicken, fish, pizza and salads. She grabbed a salad and some chicken, and then filled up a large cup full of Coke, paid for it in cash, and headed back to the Range Rover. She glanced over and saw Scooter filling the tank on the UNICAT and had to laugh. The vehicle looked as if it barely fit beneath the awning.
She got into the Rover and polished off the chicken and salad before Gordon and Abel had even come out of the store, both carrying their own food supplies.
Gordon opened the back door and glanced at her empty food wrappers. “Well, looks like someone has quite an appetite.”
“We won’t be eating much nutritious food for the next few days, so I took what I could get.”
“I don’t blame you. I think we all feel the same way.”
Abel opened the passenger door and Gabe saw he had also gotten the chicken and salad. The only difference in their purchases was that instead of Coke, Gordon and Abel had both bought bottled water.
Gabe turned and saw that Scooter and his men had climbed into their vehicles. She sighed, knowing this was the last sign of civilization they would see for some time, backed the Rover out of its parking space and headed off toward the highway.
* * *
They hadn’t driven more than a mile before making the turn onto Arrada Ghayathi al Ruwais Road. They discussed what they might find in the desert and Scooter made several suggestions over the radio. But none of their theories made sense. Was Cain calling up some dark, ancient god, as Lawrence Hendricks had been doing on the island of Crete only a few months ago? She didn’t think so. He didn’t seem like the type who would bow to any god, real or imagined. Was he creating a secret weapon with which to enslave humanity? That didn’t make sense, either.
But maybe they had been looking at this all wrong. What if he wasn’t building something—what if he had found something and was trying to hide it, and possibly make use of it at the right time, just as they had done on Crete. Except this might be something bigger, and much more powerful. She glanced over at Abel and saw him staring at her.
“I believe you’ve found the answer,” he said.
Chapter Forty-Four
They had passed several unpaved roads and were about to run out of pavement themselves when Abel said, “Stop here.”
Gordon, who had taken over driving a few kilometers back to give Gabe a break, slowed to a stop. That gave everyone behind him a chance to slow, as well. Abel pointed out the window to their left.
“There.”
They sat looking out over a sea of sand dunes under a hazy, yellow sky, and Gordon could just make out what appeared to be a deep rut made from the tires of several vehicles leading off into the distance. He glanced back at Abel.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. You can see the tracks. All you have to do is follow.”
Gordon blew out a quick breath. “Yeah, but how do we know it’s them? It could be some military vehicles doing desert ops.”
“He’s been right about everything so far,” Gabe said.
The Motorola crackled to life and once again they heard Scooter’s familiar voice.
�
��What’s going on up there, guys? Is this it?”
Gordon grabbed the radio and pushed the talk-back button. “Abel says it is. I’m going to deflate the tires to sixteen PSI, and then we’ll continue. Over.”
“Roger that. Proceed when you’re ready. Out.”
Gordon put the radio down, and then dialed the setting into the automatic tire pressure monitoring system. They waited as the vehicle settled under them in response to the lower tire pressure. Although the Range Rover had an automatic setting for different types of terrain, he liked having control of it himself and put the eight-speed transmission into first and then turned onto the sand. The engine revved to compensate for the difference in terrain. He switched to second gear and it settled into a steady thirty-thousand RPM.
Gordon had spent plenty of time driving his personal vehicle on the sand of his island, and many times before that in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and the muscle memory of it quickly came back to him: maintain a steady forward motion and always gain momentum when climbing steep dunes, but avoid punching the throttle or letting off too quickly; always approach dunes head-on, not at an angle, or risk turning over; if you start to lose traction, jerk the steering wheel from side to side to get more traction; if you stall, stop the vehicle, back off the dune and go at it again, this time with plenty of momentum. It wouldn’t do to get stuck in the middle of a broiling oven like the Arabian Desert. Night time, of course, was a different story. Then, you could die from exposure.
Gordon kept his focus straight ahead, doing his best to keep the tires in the tracks that had already been made. Another safety factor was to know what was on the other side of the sand dune you were driving on, but since nobody was likely to get out of any of the vehicles to check, he would just have to hope none of them were sheer drops. He figured if they followed the tracks closely, they should be fine.
After an hour of bumpy, treacherous driving, Abel said, “I think we should stop here. If we get any closer, they might spot us and become suspicious.”
“How far do you think they are?” Gordon asked.
“Not more than a kilometer.”
Gordon glanced at Gabe. “We might be on his property and not even know it, especially if he’s building underground. This would be a good place to deploy the UAV. I’ll tell Scooter.”
* * *
They called Max to bring in the Little Bird, and then decided to get all the vehicles off the main track, in case someone else came up behind them. They parked on the far side of a tall sand dune, and then spent the next two hours with shovels and rakes, filling in the tracks they had made, the sun beating down on them like a sledgehammer. Sampson stood by, watching the proceedings with mild interest.
Soon after, Max brought the Little Bird in for a landing a few meters away to prevent sandblasting the entire party, and they all gathered by the trailer on the back of the UNICAT. Gabe noticed a smirk on Scooter’s face, like a kid about to break into a brand-new toy box. He reached up, slid the latch back and swung the door open.
It was indeed a toy box. Gabe had never seen so much high-tech weaponry crammed into such a small space.
“Holy shit, Scooter, what did you do, find a sale at the Delta Force armory?” Gordon said.
Scooter grinned. “You know the saying, Gordo—better to have it and not need it…”
“Yeah, I know…than need it and not have it. I don’t think we’ll have that problem.”
“Yet, with all this firepower, Cain could still defeat us,” Abel said.
Scooter’s grin faded. A half-chewed cigar protruded from his lips as a bead of sweat gleamed off the skin of his forehead just beneath his boonie hat. He turned and stepped toward the trailer, reached inside and grabbed an M240 machine gun off the wall mount. He hefted the big gun in his hands and pulled back the bolt as he squinted into the sun at Abel.
“Not fucking likely,” he said.
Chapter Forty-Five
They hung around inside the UNICAT, talking over their plans, waiting for nightfall, while Mad Dog and One Shot stood watch around the vehicles. Gabe prayed that they were in the right place, that their presence had not been detected, and that they were there in time to find out what Cain was up to—before it was too late. She figured it pretty likely that if Cain’s forces did see them, they would think it was just another military op.
Gabe was in awe of the UNICAT the moment she stepped inside. Her father had once owned a fairly nice Sunliner when she was a child back in Oz, but it was nothing like this: a monster truck-slash-RV with a thirteen-ton hydraulic winch attached to the front bumper.
The main living area had an L-shaped sectional built into the wall that was big enough for all six of them to sit comfortably as Scooter discussed the op via a Google Earth map wall display, courtesy of the vehicle’s Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and satellite antennae. Sampson lay spread out on the floor at their feet as if he had staked a claim for himself, close enough to get a pat on the head or a scratch on the neck from anyone within reaching distance. The generator hummed as the air conditioners blew blessedly-cold air upon Gabe’s desert-roasted flesh and she sipped a cappuccino from the machine in the kitchenette. She glanced up and saw brilliant stars shining like tiny beacons through the skylight. It was so unreal that Gabe expected Ethan Hunt of Mission: Impossible to come waltzing through the door at any second.
Scooter’s voice pulled her back down to reality. “I figure they are probably going to have some construction vehicles somewhere out there, so if we are as close as Abel says we are, it shouldn’t be that hard to find with aerial recon.” He pointed with the mouse to an area south of their location. “It’s likely they’re going to have at least a couple of guards, maybe a whole army, who knows? We should be prepared for anything, though.” Scooter glanced at Gabe. “If this guy can do the things you say he can, like call up storms and control animals and humans, then we’re going into uncharted territory.”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence as all eyes fell on Gabe.
“Everyone has a weakness, even Cain,” she said.
Once the plan was laid out, they adjourned back to the trailer, where Scooter broke out his secret weapon—an RQ-11B Raven unmanned aerial vehicle.
Gordon glanced at Scooter. “That had to be expensive.”
“About thirty-five K,” he said. “But worth it. The Army uses the hell out of these things. You don’t need special training to fly one and it weighs less than five pounds—one person can carry it in a back pack. It has a gimbaled camera that can swivel in any direction, and high-def color and infrared night vision imaging. You can see pretty much anything on the ground with these babies, any time of the day or night.”
Max snapped the plane together and set up the tripod for the ground control unit’s transmitter and receiver and he and Bio checked over the gyros, cameras, prop, stabilizers, batteries and made sure the controls worked properly.
Gabe thought the plane looked a lot like the ones her uncle used to build and fly in the bush outside Sydney when she was a child. Many of them had wing spans of over six feet and looked as if they were nearly big enough for her to ride in. This one was sleeker and smaller, and a hell of a lot more expensive.
Max took the controller, which resembled a gaming box with an eyepiece attached so the screen that could be viewed without interference from outside light sources. He placed his thumbs on the joysticks and started the motor as Bio picked up the plane, reared back like a pitcher about to throw a fastball and launched it up over the top of the next dune. It flew up at a thirty degree angle, buzzing like a giant hornet, and disappeared over the dunes.
“How are we looking?” Scooter asked.
“Good so far,” Max said, his eyes pressed against the viewer. “Lot of sand out there.”
“No shit. Just let me know if you pick up something on the IR.”
“Roger that.”
“How far out ca
n it go?” Gordon asked.
“About ten kilometers, but with the dunes in the way, a little less than that.”
“Wait, I’m picking up something,” Max said, drawing everyone’s attention.
“What is it?” Scooter asked.
There was a moment of silence as Max thumbed the plane’s controls.
“Wait. I see it now,” he continued. “It’s just a fox. Probably looking for a nice rabbit.”
“Hope he doesn’t fall down Cain’s giant rabbit hole,” Gordon said.
* * *
Less than an hour later, Max said, “I have something.”
Everyone gathered around to look at the feed on Bio’s laptop. “Just like Scooter said, some construction vehicles and supplies, all parked in a flattened-out area about a kilometer south of here,” he said.
From behind him, Abel said, “That’s it.”
Gabe could see the IR feed on the screen, illuminating everything in monochrome. There were several construction vehicles parked in different areas, but some were moving, and there were several men walking in and out of a tunnel opening built into the side of a sand dune. There were men posted around the opening, standing guard with carbines—they appeared to be private military contractors. So far, none of them were alerted to the presence of the Raven, which was flying at about one hundred fifty meters.
Max turned the plane and brought it around for another pass.
Further out past the vehicles, Gabe spotted something—a huge array of solar panels, lined up in rows, which she figured was probably how they got their power. There were likely several gas-powered generators inside the bunker, as well.