At the same time back up in the cockpit, Wizard drove the speeding plane—terribly—but right now any driver was better than none.
“Damn it,” Jack swore. “I can’t get hold of Sky Monster, so I can’t open the ramp.”
He stared up at The Halicarnassus from his speeding bus, trying to figure out another way to board it, when suddenly Astro leaned forward and said, “May I make a suggestion?”
As he spoke, he pulled an unusual weapon from a holster on his back and offered it to Jack.
Seconds later, Jack and Astro found themselves again standing on the roof of their speeding coach, only this time they were looking up at the gigantic tail fin of The Halicarnassus looming directly above them.
Astro held his unusual weapon in his hands.
It was a weapon peculiar to the elite of the United States Marine Corps, the Force Reconnaissance Marines: an Armalite MH-12A Maghook.
Looking like a twin-gripped Tommy gun, a Maghook was a pressure-launched magnetic grappling hook that came equipped with a 150-foot length of high-density cable. It could be used either as a conventional grappling hook—with its clawlike anchor-hook—or as a magnetic one, with its high-powered magnetic head that could attach to sheer metallic surfaces. The “A” variant was new, smaller than the original Maghook, about the size of a large pistol.
“I’ve heard of these, but never seen one,” Jack said.
“Don’t leave home without it,” Astro said, firing the Maghook up at the tail fin of The Halicarnassus. With a puncture-like whump, its magnetized hook soared into the air, trailing its cable behind it.
The hook slammed into the Hali ’s high tail fin and held, suctioned to the great steel fin with its magnet, holding firm.
“Now hold tight,” Astro said as he handed Jack the Maghook and pressed a button on it marked RETRACT.
Instantly, Jack was whisked up off the roof of the speeding bus, reeled upward by the Maghook’s powerful spooler.
He came level with the tail fin of The Halicarnassus and swung himself onto one of its flat side fins. Then, safely on the plane, he grabbed the Maghook again and prepared to throw it back down to Astro, so that he could come up after—
But Astro never got a chance to follow Jack: at that moment, his bus was hit from the side by one of the Egyptian coaches, a great thumping blow that knocked Astro off his feet and almost off the roof entirely.
Driving the bus, Stretch swung to look right…and found himself staring into the angry eyes of the driver of the other coach.
The driver raised a Glock pistol at Stretch—
—just as Stretch drew a Predator RPG launcher in response, holding it like a pistol, and fired.
The RPG blasted through his automatic door, smashing through the glass, and drilled into the rival bus. An instant later, the Egyptian bus traveling alongside his coach lit up with blazing white light before bursting like a firecracker into a million pieces.
Inside The Halicarnassus, Sky Monster was standing guard at the open port side wing-door, the wind whipping around him, with his shotgun levelled and ready to fire at anything that dared poke its head through the doorway.
Abruptly, two troops on the port wing slid across his view, and he fired but missed, they were too fast, and for a moment he wondered what they had been trying to do—their movement hadn’t achieved anything, when suddenly it dawned on him that it had done something: it had captured his attention.
Almost immediately, the starboard side wing-door behind him was blown inward and stormed by Egyptian SF troopers.
More raging wind rushed into the cabin.
One, then two, then three troopers charged in, AK-47s up and ready to shred the totally exposed figure of Sky Monster—
Blam!-blam!-blam!
Multiple gun blasts filled the cabin.
Sky Monster was ready to collapse under a hailstorm of bullets, but it was the three intruders who fell, their bodies exploding in fountains of blood.
As they dropped to the floor, Sky Monster spun and saw who had shot them: Jack, standing on the port wing, his Desert Eagle smoking. He must have fired over Sky Monster’s shoulder from behind.
Sky Monster sighed with relief, only to see Jack’s expression turn to one of horror. “Monster! Look out!”
Sky Monster spun, bewildered, to see one of the three fallen Egyptians, hit but not dead, whip up a pistol with a bloodied hand and aim it at him from point-blank range. The Egyptian pulled the trigger—just as from out of nowhere a speeding blur of brown whooshed past him and in the blink of an eye the Egyptian was gunless.
It was Horus.
Jack’s little falcon—who’d remained on board the Hali during the mission at Abu Simbel—had snatched the gun from the attacker’s bloody fingers!
Jack stepped past Sky Monster and kicked the shocked Egyptian out the starboard doorway and suddenly there was silence in the cabin, a brief moment of respite.
Horus landed on Jack’s shoulder, presenting him with the Egyptian’s pistol. “Good work, bird,” Jack said, striding back to Sky Monster and replacing the hairy pilot’s earpiece in his ear. “If you’re down here, who’s driving?”
