Free Dragon City by James Axler Page A

a voice called over the fuzzy speaker system from the cockpit. It was the pilot, a local man called Mahood, whose English was heavily accented with the emphasis on the wrong syllables, making it hard at times to decipher.
    Grant nodded, inhaling deeply and projecting a sense of calm. “How long?” he asked, his finger depressing the radio comm button set in the wall.
    Mahood muttered something in the local dialect, then repeated it in English for his passengers. “Two minutes is maximum.”
    “Great,” Grant said, wondering if the sarcasm in his tone was lost on the foreigner. He hoped it was; the man was risking his own neck for the Cerberus team, skirting the edges of the dubious no-fly zone.
    Swiveling on the bench, Grant turned to look out the window nearest him. It was a horizontal slit of perhaps three inches in height, and Grant had to peer closely to get a decent view of the outside. The others crowded over to their own windows, all except for Rosalia, who stayed with her dog, hushing the animal as it whined in time with the straining engines.
    “There it is,” Grant muttered, pushing his face closer to the window without thinking about it.
    Down below, off to the port side of the renovated helicopter, the dragon seemed to crouch at the banks of the wide strip of river. Wisps of cloud cut the view for a moment, a V-shaped flock of squawking geese swooping by, and then the dragon reappeared, ill lit in the dwindling light of dusk. It was hard to assess the size of it from so far away, but Grant had seen the aerial photographs from the satellite and he already had a rough idea. That idea hadn’t prepared him for looking at the structure itself, however.
    It was not a dragon, even though its shape suggested one. Close up, it was not even a single structure. Rather, a series of buildings were poised along the banks of the Euphrates, with no apparent uniformity to their designs. Here a minaret poked upward to the clouds; there a low, flat rooftop reflected the dwindling rays of the setting sun as it painted the surrounds in orange and vermilion. Yet despite the differences, each building contributed to the whole, each formed a part of the dragon’s body, head and wings. As the satellite image had suggested, one of those wings—the rightmost—sloped out across the river itself, the juddering struts of low buildings ridging across its surface. And everything, everything was creamy white.
    “It’s incredible,” Domi whispered, her voice hushed with awe.
    “More than that,” Grant said, “it’s like nothing on Earth.”
    “Then where did it come from?”
    “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Grant assured her. “Which means we have to get lower.”
    With that, the ex-Magistrate flicked the radio transmission button again to speak with the pilot. “Bring us down, Mahood,” he instructed. “Let’s see if we can find us a landing area.”
    With a word of acknowledgment from the cockpit, the sturdy chopper banked left, its body rolling closer toward the dragon-shaped settlement. There was something else about it, Grant realized as they got closer. Despite all those buildings, he could see no people out in the streets, no one wandering amid the lifeless structures.
    “My cousin Hassood will meet us by the left wing.” Mahood’s voice came over the radio speaker again. “There’s a flat space out there just beyond city limits where we can land. There’ll be a bit of a walk, I’m afraid.”
    “Fine by me,” Grant began, but before the last word had left his lips, a bright burst of dazzling scarlet light flashed outside like lightning and the Blackbird shook as though it had struck something. “What th—?”
    A moment later the chopper shuddered violently, and Grant, Domi and the others found themselves tossed across the metal decking. They were under attack.
    * * *
    G RABBING AT WHATEVER PASSED for handholds in the chopper’s interior, Grant hurried forward as the craft continued to shake.