JAMES ROLLINS - SANDSTORM

With a nod, Safia turned and began the descent.

She heard Painter speak to Coral. “I need your bike.”

CASSANDRA WATCHEDthe blue spinning ring on the transceiver blink out. She balled a fist. The curator was on the run again.

“Get us over there,” Cassandra said between clenched teeth. “Now.”

“We’re already here.”

Out of the gloom, a stone wall appeared, crumbling, sand-scoured, more outline than substance, illuminated by their headlights.

They’d reached the ruins.

Kane glanced at her. “Orders?”

Cassandra pointed to an opening in the wall, near a broken tower. “Get your men on the ground. I want the ruins locked down. No one leaves that chasm.”

Kane slowed the tractor enough for his crack team of commandos to roll out the side doors, leaping over the trundling treads. Twenty men, bristling with weapons, spread into the storm, vanishing through the gap in the wall.

Kane drove the tractor ahead, moving at a snail’s pace.

The tractor crunched over the stone foundations of the ancient wall and into the inner city of old Ubar. The tractor’s headlights pierced no more than a few feet as the storm wailed and cast up gouts of sand.

The sinkhole lay ahead, dark and silent.

It was time to end all this.

The tractor braked. Its headlights pierced ahead.

Men dropped flat along the rim, using the cover of boulders and tumbled bits of ruins. Cassandra waited while the team took up positions, winging out to either side, encircling the sinkhole. She listened to their radio chatter, subvocalized over throat mikes.

“In position, quadrant three…”

“Mongoose four, on the tower…”

“RPGs locked and loaded…”

Cassandra hit Command Q on her keyboard and twenty-one red triangles bloomed on the schematic on the map. Each of the commandos had a locator beacon tagged to his fatigues. On the screen, she watched the team maneuver into position, no hesitation, efficient, fast.

Kane directed his men from the command tractor. He stood, palms on the console, leaning forward to stare out the windshield.

“They’re all in position. No movement seen below. All dark.”

Cassandra knew Safia was there, hidden underground. “Light it up.”

Kane relayed the order.

All around the rim, a dozen floodlights snapped on, carried by the soldiers and aimed down into the hole. The chasm now glowed in the storm.

Kane held one hand over his radio earpiece. He listened for half a breath, then spoke. “Still no hostiles in sight. Bikes and buggies below.”

“Can they see any cavern entrance down there?”

Kane nodded. “Where the vehicles are parked. A black hole. Video feed should be transmitting now. Channel three.”

Cassandra brought up another screen on her laptop. Real-time video feed. The image was shaky, pixilating and vibrating. Static interference. A shimmer of electric charge danced down the whip antenna strapped outside the tractor.

The storm was kicking into full blow.

Cassandra leaned closer. On the screen, she saw wavering images of the chasm floor. Sand bikes with huge knobby tires. A scatter of Sidewinder desert dune buggies. But they were all abandoned. Where were all the people? The image swung, centered on a dark hole, three yards wide. It looked like a fresh excavation, glistening, reflecting back the spotlights.

A tunnel opening.

And all the rabbits had ducked into the hole.

The video image scrambled, refocused, then was lost again. Cassandra bit back a curse. She wanted to see this for herself. She closed the jittery window on the screen and glanced at the spread of Kane’s men on the glowing schematic. They had the area locked down tight.

Cassandra unbuckled. “I’m going to get a visual. Hold the fort.”

She pushed to the back compartment and slid open the side door. The winds knocked her back, slamming her full in the face. She bent into the wind with a grimace, yanked a scarf over her mouth and nose, and shoved out. Using the tractor’s tread as a step, she jumped to the sand.

She crossed to the front of the tractor, one hand on the tread for support. Winds battered her. She had new respect for Kane’s men. When she was ensconced inside the command vehicle, their deployment seemed satisfactory: quick, efficient, no fumbling. Now it seemed extraordinary.

Cassandra crossed in front of the tractor, stepping between the two headlights. She followed the beams toward the sinkhole. It was only steps, but by the time she reached the rim, she could barely hear the growl of the tractor over the roar of the storm.

“How’s things look, Captain?” Kane asked through her radio earpiece.

She knelt and peered below. The chasm stretched ahead of her. Opposite her position, the far side of the sinkhole was a tumbled slope of rock, still rolling with tiny slides. A fresh avalanche. What the hell had happened? She shifted her gaze directly below her.

The tunnel entrance stared back at her, a glistening eye, crystalline.

Glass.

Her pulse quickened at the sight of it. This had to be the entrance to whatever treasure lay below. Her gaze swept over the parked vehicles. She could not let them steal the prize.

She touched her throat mike. “Kane, I want a full team ready to enter that tunnel in five minutes.”

There was no answer.

“Kane,” she shouted louder, twisting around.

The tractor’s headlights blinded her.

She shoved to the side. Suspicion flared.

She moved forward, only then spotting something knocked on its side, in the lee of the wall, abandoned, half covered in sand.

A sand bike.

Only one person was that clever.

THE KNIFEstabbed at his face. Tangled, rolling across the floor, Painter turned his head, avoiding a fatal plunge to the eye. The dagger sliced his cheek, grazing the bone under his eye.

Fury and desperation fueled Painter’s strength. Despite the blood flowing, he kept his legs pinned around the other man’s legs, his right arm clenched around the man’s neck.

The bastard was as strong as a bull, bucking, rolling.

Painter pinned him, trapping his knife arm.

As he had climbed through the side door of the tractor, left conveniently ajar by Cassandra, he’d recognized the man. Painter had been hiding, buried under loose, windblown sand piled against the crumbling wall. Five minutes ago, he had ridden the sand bike at breakneck speeds up out of the sinkhole and raced to the gap in the east wall. He knew Cassandra’s forces would have to come through there with any vehicles.

He hadn’t expected the behemoth of a tractor, a twenty-ton monster from the look of it. A bus fitted with tank treads. But it suited his purpose better than an ordinary truck.

He had crawled out of hiding as the tractor stopped, idling in the storm. He had ducked between the back treads. As he expected, all attention had been focused on the sinkhole.

Then Cassandra had stepped from the vehicle, giving him the opening he needed. With the door unlocked, Painter had slipped into the back compartment, pistol in hand.

Unfortunately, his wrestling partner, John Kane, must’ve caught Painter’s reflection in the glass. He had swung around on a splinted leg and snapped out with the other, knocking the pistol from Painter’s hand.

Now they struggled on the floor.

Painter maintained his choke hold. Kane tried to slam the back of his head into the bridge of Painter’s nose. Painter avoided the blow. Instead, he yanked the man’s head back even farther and slammed it hard against the metal floor.

A groan.

He repeated the action three more times. The man went limp. Painter continued to clamp his forearm over the man’s neck. Only then did he note the blood spreading across the gray metal. Nose broken.