Pooh Bear gunned his Freelander—with Zoe and Alby still in it with him—accelerating hard, his eyes fixed on the loading ramp of the Hali.
The little Freelander skimmed along the highway, gaining on the plane, when suddenly Alby called, “Look out!” and Pooh yanked on the steering wheel just in time to avoid a kamikaze-style lunge from an enemy Humvee on the right.
The Humvee missed them by inches and went careering off the road, bouncing away into the dust.
“Thanks, young man!” Pooh shouted.
At that moment, Zoe’s cell phone rang. Thinking it’d be Wizard or one of the others, she answered it with a yell, “Yeah!”
“Oh, hello,”a soft female voice said pleasantly from the other end.“Is that you, Zoe? This is Lois Calvin, Alby’s mother. I was just calling to see how everything was going there on the farm.”
Zoe blanched. “Lois! Er…hi! Things are going…great…”
“Is Alby there?”
“Wha—huh?” Zoe stammered, trying to process the weirdness of receiving this call at this moment. In the end, she just handed the phone to Alby. “It’s your mother. Please be discreet.”
A missile whooshed by overhead.
“Mom…” Alby said
Zoe didn’t hear the other end of the conversation, only Alby saying, “We’re out in the east paddock in a jeep…I’m having a great time…oh yeah, we’re keeping busy all right…Lily’s good…I will…yes, Mom…yes,Mom… okay, Mom, bye!”
He hung up and handed the cell phone back.
“Nice talkin’, kid,” Zoe said.
“My mom’d have kittens if she knew where I was now,” Alby said.
“So would my mother,” Pooh Bear growled as he pulled the Freelander right in behind The Halicarnassus and readied to zoom up its ramp when—bamthey were hit with terrible force from the left, by another Humvee that none of them had seen.
The Freelander was thrown violently to the right, out of alignment with the Hali ’s ramp, and it slammed up against the broad flank of one of the two Egyptian buses attacking the plane’s starboard wing, pinned against it by the Humvee.
“Blast!” Pooh Bear shouted.
On the right wing of The Halicarnassus, Jack was still doing battle with the oncoming Egyptian forces—firing hard, with Horus hovering nearby—when he saw the Freelander bounce into view from underneath the tail of the speeding 747, the little 4WD being squeezed up against one of the Egyptian buses by a far bigger Humvee.
His first thought, strangely, was of Alby—Lily’s friend; Lily’s loyal little friend—and how he was still in the Freelander, and suddenly in a strange disconnected corner of his mind, Jack knew that Alby’s destiny was connected to Lily’s, that he somehow sustained her, gave her strength, and in that moment Jack knew that he couldn’t let anything happen to the boy. Zoe and Pooh Bear, they could take care of themselves, but not Alby.
And so he acted.
“See you later, bird,” he said to Horus. “Any cover you can provide would be appreciated.”
Just then two more Egyptian troopers tried to mount the starboard wing—both of them bearing riot shields —at the exact same moment that Jack charged out from his cover onto the wing, shot both of them through their eye slits and in one clean move, scooped up one of the dead men’s shields and leaped down… onto the roof of the first Egyptian bus driving along beneath the wing!
There he was met by no less than seven Egyptian special forces troops, momentarily shocked to see him, one lone man, attacking them.
At which point Horus rushed into their midst, talons slashing, slicing three deep claw marks across the first soldier’s face and unbalancing the second.
It gave Jack the moment he needed, for he wasn’t planning on staying on that roof for long.
Holding the riot shield in one hand, he pivoted quickly and dropped off the bus’s leading edge, dropping down in front of its windshield—attaching the grappling hook of Astro’s Maghook to the forward edge of the roof as he fell.
He swung down in front of the speeding bus’s windshield—completely shocking its driver—but continued downward, dropping the Kevlar shield underneath him as he hit the speeding roadway, using it as a body-board and disappearing under the bumper of the big coach!
Down the length of the bus Jack slid—under it—lying on his back on the riot shield, using the Maghook’s rope to control his slide.
As he went, he grabbed his Desert Eagle and fired it into every vital mechanical part he could see: axles, electronics, brake cables, fluid hoses—so that just as he popped out from underneath its rear bumper, the Egyptian bus started to veer wildly, out of control, off the highway and away from the plane.
But Jack’s wild slide wasn’t finished yet.
The second Egyptian bus—the one Pooh’s Freelander was pinned against—was tailing the first one, so underthat bus Jack went, still sliding on his shield.
As he went under the second bus, he hit a button on his Maghook, causing it to reel in quickly.
Free-sliding under the second bus, he could see the speeding wheels of the Freelander only a few yards away and, beyond them, the larger tires of the Humvee—so as he slid, Jack extended his gun hand sideways and fired
