Sandstorm

6:05 P.M.

CASSANDRA CROUCHEDwith two of her men. Gunfire rattled and spat all around. After the first RPG blast had caught her off guard, Cassandra had entered the fray, moving into the wreck and tumble of the town.

Fighting continued, but her team was making steady progress.

She stared through the sights of a rifle and waited. The cluster of blocky homes lay before her, limned in shades of emerald and silver through her night-vision goggles. Having also employed an overlay of infrared, she watched a red blob move beyond a glass wall, near a corner. One of the enemy.

She studied the silhouette. Her target carried a tube on his shoulder, blazing like a small sun. Fiery hot. One of the launchers. She had instructed her men to focus their attention on such objectives. They had to eliminate the enemy’s long-range capabilities.

By the wall, her target shifted, moving out into the open, positioning the grenade launcher.

Cassandra centered her crosshairs on the hottest part of the enemy’s body-the head. She squeezed her trigger. Just once. That’s all she needed.

Through the infrared, she saw the spray of fire blossom outward.

A clean shot.

But some twitched reflex fired the launcher.

Cassandra watched the RPG blast away, blinding on her scopes. She rolled to her back, dazzled. The grenade sailed high overhead, the aim way off course, as the enemy’s body fell backward.

Angled toward the roof as the grenade was, she lost sight of it against the brilliant display of electrical discharges storming across the ceiling. She flipped away the infrared overlay and toggled off the night-vision mode. Through the regular lenses, the roof still blazed. The display had grown more violent, filling the entire cap of the dome. Small arcs of electricity speared out like bolts of lightning.

Across the lake, the misfired RPG exploded. It had struck the far wall, opposite the city. She focused the telescopic view.

Fuck…She could not catch a goddamn break.

The grenade struck the wall above the tunnel leading into the cavern. She watched a section of the glass wall tear away from the rock behind it, along with a portion of the tunnel room. It collapsed, sealing the tunnel.

Their exit was now blocked.

She rolled to her stomach. The surface team would just have to dig them out. The immediate concern was to secure this town, capture Safia, and extract the prize here. She flipped her infrared overlay back over her goggles’ lenses.

It was time to continue the hunt.

Her two men had gone forward already to check the body and confiscate the launcher. They were ready to move on.

Cassandra paused to check her electronic tracker.

Safia lay a short distance ahead. Red triangles, the beacons from her team, closed on her position from all directions.

Satisfied, Cassandra almost pocketed the device, but the elevation reading alongside the blue glowing ring caught her eye. She froze. That didn’t make sense.

Cassandra stared up again at the blazing roof. If the reading was correct, Safia was on the surface. Was there another way out?

She touched her throat mike and sent out a general alert over the open channel, reaching every man. “Close in now! Full run! Leave no one alive!”

Cassandra rose from her position and joined her men.

“Let’s finish this.”