“Hi there. Nice to see you awak—”
He was cut off as their car was jolted violently, hit from behind by one of the Egyptian Humvees that had itself charged up the loading ramp after them!
Wizard was thrown forward, then he snapped round and saw the intruder.
Instinct kicked in.
He jammed the Suburban into reverse and hit the gas.
The Suburban lurched backward and slammed into the unsuspecting Humvee, shunting itback down the ramp and out of the plane, back into the sunshine, where the hapless Humvee hit the road and, its brakes locking, jackknifed sideways and tumbled into a roll. Two chase cars managed to avoid it before a third car—a big troop truck—hit it square in the side and finished both of them off.
“Sky Monster!” Wizard called from the hold. “Pull up that ramp and go!”
“On it, Wiz!”
the Hali ’s engines roared louder, firing up for takeoff. At the same time, the loading ramp came up and through the slowly closing aperture, Wizard saw the chase convoy—an angry body of heavily armed vehicles.
But then just as the ramp was about halfway closed, he saw the convoy split in the middle and allow a Humvee to come to the front: a Humvee with a rocket-launcher pod mounted on its back.
The Humvee fired—a single lethal rocket streaking out of its pod, and Wizard’s eyes boggled at the thought that the rocket might shoot inside the hold and go off, but instead the missile banked away to the side, darting out of Wizard’s sight.
He sighed with relief. A miss.
Only to realize a sickening moment later that it wasn’t a miss at all.
For right then he heard one of the Hali ’s two starboard engines get hit.
IT WAS A DIRECT HIT—the missile slammed into The Halicarnassus ’s outer starboard engine, causing it to blast out in a thousand pieces and spew a thick horizontal column of black smoke.
“Fuck me sideways!”Sky Monster yelled, flicking switches, dumping fuel that could be ignited by the exploded engine and cutting all excess lines so that the fire didn’t spread to the tanks inside the wing.
He looked out his starboard cockpit window. The engine was a tangled mess of twisted metal and smoke. He’d have to jettison it. Takeoff was still possible, but with only three engines it would be a whole lot harder: they’d need a longer runway.
The damage had been done.
The plane slowed.
And the chase convoy pounced.
It was an incredible sight.
A 747 jumbo jet racing down a vast desert highway, pursued by a horde of military vehicles—Humvees, jeeps, trucks, and coaches—all of them rushing along at well over sixty miles an hour, like a pack of hyenas chasing down a wounded water buffalo.
When they got in range, the chase convoy attacked.
Naturally, their first strategy was to fire at the Hali ’s tires, but the big plane had a set of Kevlar guards shielding them and the bullets just pinged away.
So the chasers adopted a second, more ruthless option.
The first chase truck rushed forward and swung in under the left-hand wing of the Hali, where it threw off its canvas roof to reveal a platoon of fully armed Egyptian special forces troops.
They wasted no time employing a standard plane-storming technique—they danced up onto their truck’s driver’s cabin and from there leaped up onto the wing at its lowest point, at the spot where it met The Halicarnassus ’s fuselage.
Sky Monster watched helplessly from the cockpit. “Oh, damn, damn, damn.”
He went to the window on the other side and saw an entire bus of soldiers swing in under the armpit of the starboard wing with more men climbing up through a hatch onto its roof, readying themselves to storm that wing.
“Shit, shit, shit…”
Wizard arrived in the cockpit with Lily. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve lost engine four and now they’re boarding us via the wings!” Sky Monster said. “And we have no defense against that! They’re like fleas I can’t shake.”
“You have to do something…!”
“Wizard, I don’t know of any pilots who’ve been in this kind of situation before! I’m adapting the best I can!”
“Can we take off?”
“Yes, but we’ll need a hell of a long runway.” Sky Monster started swinging The Halicarnassus wildly left and right.
On the wing outside, the Egyptian troops staggered and struggled for balance, grabbing for handholds, one of them dropping off the wing with a shout and falling to the road below.
But they soon got their balance, and the bus under the starboard wing began unloading more troops.
