At the sound of automatic gunfire Hyde stamped on the brake to bring the armored personnel carrier to a slithering stop.
“Form a perimeter,” he shouted, throwing himself from the cab.
Another volley crackled in the night, this time from a different source. The sides of the wadi reflected sound so it was hard to tell where the shots had come from. Behind him the men poured from the back of the carrier and started fanning out, circling the parked vehicle and moving up the dry banks. More sporadic fire rippled across the desert from a couple of new sources. It had the distinctive rattle of the AK-47, favored weapon of the local insurgents. It was coming from everywhere.
Hyde made it to the top of the bank and surveyed the desert over the top of his M4. His night scope made the barren landscape glow green. He spotted the incandescent flash of gunfire about a hundred yards from his position. It was one of the Ghost’s men, looping around in circles and shooting into the sky.
“It’s the Bedouin,” he shouted to his men. “They’re drawing our fire. Stay here and engage them.”
He threw himself down the bank of the wadi, signaling for a couple of men to follow and took off on foot down the riverbed just as bursts of M4 fire started to respond to the AK rounds. He followed the hoofprints in the dust until he spotted the back end of a white jeep sticking out of a cave up ahead.
Hyde approached the cave in a low crouch, leading with the barrel of his rifle. He ducked his head around the edge of the cave, scoping inside with his night sight.
“Stay here,” he whispered. “Make sure I’m the only one who comes out.”
He crept forward, quartering the darkness with his night vision, making sure nothing was ahead of him. He was happier going in alone. An enclosed and possibly hostile environment was the worst place to be with people you didn’t know and didn’t trust.
He found Dick’s body sprawled massively on the floor of a small chamber, a single bullet hole in his temple, his eyes open and reflecting green in the infrared beam of Hyde’s night scope. He scanned the space and found a footprint in the dust, heading deeper into the cave. He moved toward it, then stopped. There was something too perfect about it, too deliberate. He thought back to where he’d left the two soldiers and realized his mistake. Dick and the Ghost had ridden there. But when he’d arrived, there had been no horses.