the country’s best universities, who were emerging from one of the tents just as he was nearing it.
“They killed Reece,” he yelled to them, pausing momentarily and waving frantically back toward the main tent. “They killed him.” He looked back and saw Maddox closing in inexorably, seemingly carried forward on winged feet, and took off again, glancing back to see his friends turn to the onrushing man with confused looks, crimson sprouts erupting from their chests as Maddox gunned them down without even slowing.
Danny had ducked sideways, behind the mess tent, out of breath, his leg muscles burning, his mind churning desperately for escape options, when the project’s two ageing Jeeps appeared before him, parked under their makeshift shelter. He flung the first car’s door open, spurred the engine to life, threw the car into gear, and floored the accelerator, storming off in a spray of sand and dust just as Maddox rounded the tent.
Danny kept an eye on the rearview mirror as his Jeep charged across the harsh gravel plain. He clenched the steering wheel through bloodless knuckles, confused thoughts assaulting his senses from all directions, his heart feeling like it was jackhammering its way out of his chest, and did the only thing he could think of, which was to keep the car aimed straight ahead, across the deserted terrain, away from the camp, away from that crazed, insane maniac who’d killed his mentor and his friends, all while fighting for a way around the horrifying truth of his predicament, which was that there was nowhere to run. They were in the middle of nowhere, with no villages or habitations anywhere near, not for hundreds of miles.
That was the whole point of being there.
That fear didn’t have much time to torment him as a loud, throaty buzz soon burst through his frazzled thoughts. He looked back and saw the camp’s chopper coming straight at him, reeling him in effortlessly. He pegged the gas pedal to the floor, hard, sending the Jeep bounding over the small rocks and undulations of the outback, slamming his head against the inside of the car’s canvas roof with each jarring leap, avoiding the occasional boulder and the lonely bunches of dried up quiver trees that dotted the deathly landscape.
The chopper was now on his tail, its engine noise deafening, its rotor wash drowning the Jeep in a swirling sandstorm. Danny strained to see ahead through the tornado of dust, not that it made much difference since there was no road to follow, as the chopper dropped down heavily on the car’s roof, crushing the thin struts holding up the roof and almost tearing Danny’s head off.
He veered left, then right, fishtailing the car as he fought to avoid the flying predator’s claws, sweat seeping down his face, the car careening wildly over rocks and cactus bushes. The chopper was never more than mere feet from the Jeep, connecting with it in thunderous blows, slapping it from side to side like it was toying with a hockey puck. The thought of stopping didn’t occur to Danny: He was running on pure adrenaline, his survival instincts choking him in their grasp, an irrational hope of escape propelling him forward. And just then, in that maelstrom of panic and fear, something shifted, something changed, and he sensed the chopper pulling up slightly, felt a spike of hope that maybe, just maybe, he might make it out of that nightmare alive, and the twisting cloud of sand around his Jeep lifted—
—and that’s when he saw the canyon, cutting across the terrain dead ahead of him with sadistic inevitability, a vast limestone trench snaking across the landscape like something from the Wild West, the one he’d seen in countless cowboy films and had hoped to visit someday but hadn’t yet, the one he now knew, with a savage certainty, that he’d never get a chance to see, as the Jeep flew off the canyon’s edge and into the dry desert air.
II. Wadi Natrun, Egypt
Sitting cross-legged in his usual spot high up on the mountain, with the barren valley and the endless desert spread out below him, the old priest felt a rising unease. During his last few visits to that desolate place, he’d sensed a more ominous ring to the words that were reverberating inside his head. And today, there was something distinctly portentous about them.
And then it came. A question that sent a straightening spasm shooting up his spine.