More black cars squealed to a stop outside the gates, followed by black vans. Men in full combat gear poured out of them.
Then the impossible happened. One of the black cars suddenly flung itself upward, as if ripped from the ground and tossed by a giant hand.
The helicopter swerved in a violent, adrenaline-pumping sideways dive. McDwyer felt a frozen moment of terror as he watched the car's rear tire slip just inches past the windshield. The pilot shouted and fought with the controls, and for a moment McDwyer thought they were all done.
He had the door already open before the pilot cut the engine, and he had grabbed his weapon case and was out and moving just before the world exploded.
***
Sarah stood on the front walk as the sky over her head turned black. Blood soaked through the bandage on her shoulder. But the pain was nothing now; she let it go with the rest, with the glorious, burning energy searing through her body. The air rippled as she seemed to swell in size, as she spread her arms out to the wind. Blue streaks leapt from her fingers to meet the clouds, touched her face, her hair, formed a halo around her head. She gasped, threw her hands higher, eyes rolling backward into her skull.
Out by the gates a car went flipping end over end through the air, narrowly missing the helicopter, which landed hard in the street.
One of the remaining cars exploded. A ball of yellow flame shot skyward. A van went next, the fireball erupting from the rear gas tank. And then the helicopter, with its rotors still turning lazily in the wind, seemed to puff once and stutter before the tanks went up and it disappeared into a blinding flash of white-yellow heat.
Debris tinkled across pavement, chunks of steaming metal thudding and tumbling across the grass. A piece of someone's hand, two fingers attached and twitching, landed next to Sarah's left foot. Across the street, half of a rotor blade buried itself three feet deep into the side of an abandoned row house, the metal end that protruded still smoking.
A man ran screaming across the lawn, his hair on fire. Others within the attack squad who had survived the blasts had gathered their wits about them enough to organize themselves, and the chatter of weapons joined the dull whoosh and crackle of the burning vehicles.
Sarah turned in the direction of the gunfire. The air rippled like a colorless wave passing through, and a crack zigzagged its way across the front lawn toward the guardhouse. The ground opened up and swallowed it with a shriek and a tearing of wood and metal, buckling the gates and melting the asphalt and concrete curb into a gooey mess that looked like a giant stripe of warm chocolate.
The crack continued to snake across the sidewalk, and the front axle of the remaining van fell with a thunk into the gap. The van teetered for a moment on the edge of the wide, black mouth, back end swinging up toward the sky, and then it tipped over the edge and fell with the crunch of shattered glass.
Three men with guns were exposed, still crouching behind where the van used to be. With a grunt of satisfaction she picked them up and hurled them thirty feet backward, right past the quivering rotor blade, through a clapboard wall, and into the room behind it.
***
The blast from the exploding helicopter felt like a giant hand pressed firmly into McDwyer's back. The air whooshed from his lungs as the hand gave a violent shove. He was airborne for perhaps ten feet, but kept his wits about him long enough to tuck and roll into the impact with the ground.
Still, stars exploded across his vision with the collision and he lay sprawled for a moment, stunned. The explosions had done something to his hearing. Everything sounded as if it were underwater.
When he got to his feet he was bleeding from badly scraped palms and a gash on his forehead.
He licked his lips and tasted blood.
The air temperature had plummeted to something approaching midwinter. And yet the fires still burned, and the heat coming off anything the girl's mind had touched was like the blast from a furnace.
He thought back to his years of training, clamped down hard, prayed to God for strength. He had never been so scared of anything in his life. All the reports he had read about her were nothing compared to this.
When he felt the ground shake under his feet and the earth cracked open across the lawn, swallowing everything in its path, he turned and scrabbled across the road to the large, black suitcase that had come to rest near the curb.
He had to get to higher ground, get himself under cover, and find a place to take the shot. A small commercial building was located about a hundred yards down the street. He ducked and ran, moving behind parked cars and darting between open spaces. He heard men screaming, another explosion, things shattering.
The first floor of the building was a pizza parlor, or it had been at one time. Now it looked like a crack den. Two black women and a man with piercings through his nose and the tattoo of a dragon wrapped around his neck huddled against the back wall as he kicked through the door. 'You stay away!' the man shouted. He was shivering and he held out a gun. 'I called the fucking cops. It's World War Three out there. Who are they? Arabs? Are they gonna kill us? Why's it so goddamned cold?'
'Tell me where the stairs are, right now,' McDwyer said, ignoring the gun. 'And get the fuck out of sight.'
The man hesitated a moment; then he must have seen something in McDwyer's eyes and lowered the gun. He led him to a door in the back room. McDwyer slipped quickly up the steps, past three landings and more closed doors, until he reached the roof.
Outside he quickly surveyed the scene: tar and crushed stone flat surface, three-foot-high walls all around. He had no time for testing, had to put things together fast and clean, take the shot, and get out. It was a good spot, plenty of room and the right distance. He could set up on the flat top of a steel vent cover and kneel on the surface of the roof to get her in his sights, all the while keeping himself almost completely concealed.
He set down his case, flipped the latches, and lifted the lid, then set out assembling the unit in thirty seconds flat. The 'Light Fifty,' or M82A1 A, was a .50-caliber, semiautomatic, air-cooled rifle with a Unertl 10-power scope. He would use M2 Browning Machine Gun cartridges in this case.
This was too far away to risk a dart shot, and it was too late for that anyway. They had done extensive research into the type of weapon that would be necessary to take the girl down. These rounds were large enough to kill an elephant. They should do the job nicely.
***
Jess Chambers watched the man from the helicopter as he ran down the street. At first she thought he was running away from them, but then she saw him kick open the door of what looked like some kind of restaurant.
When she saw the wink of something peeking over the rooftop a couple of minutes later, she knew.
She screamed a warning into the wind.
***
The scope picked up everything, made it just as nice and clean and sharp as a fine sunny day at the beach. The air around her was thick with swirling dust and smoke, but McDwyer was used to conditions of blowing sand in 120-degree heat, and it didn't shake him now.
His hands were shaking. Why wouldn't they be still? He blinked and saw a little girl he'd never met. But this was no ordinary girl he was looking at. He had a job to do.
