Sandstorm by James Rollins Read Free Book Online Page B

His skin was tanned the color of saddle leather, his hair gone a sandy gray. He caught her glance.
    “We’re close!” he yelled above the whining growl of their engines. He gunned his engine and sped down the windward side of the dune.
    Kara raced after him, bent over her cycle’s handlebars, followed closely by their bedouin guide. It had been Habib who had led them to their quarry. It had also been the bedouin’s skilled shot that had first wounded the oryx. Though impressed with his marksmanship, shooting the antelope on the fly, Kara had become furious upon learning the wounding had been deliberate, meant not to kill.
    “To slow…for the girl,” Habib had explained.
    Kara had rankled at the cruelty…and the insult. She had been hunting with her father from the age of six. She was not without skill herself and preferred a clean kill. Purposely wounding the animal was needlessly savage.
    She cranked the throttle, kicking up sand.
    Some, especially back in England, raised their eyebrows at her up-bringing, considering her a tomboy, especially with no mother. Kara knew better. Traveling half the world, she had been raised with no pre-tensions about the line between men and women. She knew how to defend herself, how to fight with fist or knife.
    Reaching the bottom of the dune now, Kara and their guide caught up with her father as his cycle bogged down in a camel wallow, a patch of loose sand that sucked like quicksand. They passed him in a cloud of dust.
    Her father bulled the bike out of the wallow and gave chase up the next dune, a massive six-hundred-foot mountain of red sand.
    Kara reached the crest first with Habib, slowing slightly until she could see what lay beyond. And it was lucky she had. The far side of the dune fell away as steeply as a cliff, ending in a wide plain of flat sand. She could have easily tumbled tail over head down the slope.
    Habib waved for her to stop. She obeyed, knowing better than to proceed. She idled her bike. Stopped now, she felt the heavy heat drop like a weight on her shoulders, but she barely noticed. Her breath escaped her in a long awed sigh.
    The view beyond the dune was spectacular. The sun, near to setting, tempered the flat sand to sheer glass. Heat mirages shimmered in pools, casting an illusion of vast lakes of water, a false promise in an unforgiving landscape.
    Still, another sight held Kara transfixed. In the center of the plain, a lone funnel of sand spiraled up from below, vanishing into a cloud of dust far overhead.
    A sand devil.
    Kara had seen such sights before, including the more violent sandstorms that could whip out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly. Still, this sight somehow struck her deeply. The solitary nature of this tempest, its perfect stillness in the plain. There was something mysterious and foreign about it.
    She heard Habib mumbling beside her, head bent, as if in prayer.
    Her father joined them then, drawing back her attention. “There she is!” he said, panting and pointing at the base of the steep slope.
    The oryx struggled across the open plain of sand, limping badly now.
    Habib held up his hand, stirring out of his prayer. “No, we go no further.”
    Her father frowned. “What are you talking about?”
    Their guide kept his gaze ahead. His thoughts were hidden behind dark Afrika Corps goggles and a woolen Omani headcloth, called a shamag.
    “We go no further,” Habib repeated thickly. “This is the land of the nisnases, the forbidden sands. We must turn back.”
    Her father laughed. “Nonsense, Habib.”
    “Papa?” Kara asked.
    He shook his head and explained, “The nisnases are the bogeymen of the deep desert. Black djinns, ghosts that haunt the sands.”
    Kara glanced back to the unreadable features of their guide. The Empty Quarter of Arabia, the Rub‘ al-Khali, was the world’s largest sand mass, dwarfing even the Sahara, and the fantastic tales flowing out of the region were as many as they were outlandish. But some folk