Chapter Twenty

The Dragunov barked, its flash suppressor briefly painting the hood and the windshield of the Land Cruiser with brilliant, orange-white light. Blake felt the familiar mechanical kick in his shoulder and kept the sight on his target, following through.

In the sight, there was one more three-round burst of muzzle flash, pointed upward. Then nothing.

Blake swung the sight left, to the open gate, illuminated by the light in the courtyard beyond. He saw the form of a man passing through it with a rifle at quarter-arms and Blake led the figure slightly and squeezed, seeing only the back half of the distant man’s body as he fell.

The next Iranian came charging straight out and Blake aimed high, center mass, and saw him drop half a second after he pulled the trigger. In the silence after the shot, he heard his expended brass hit the truck’s windshield and bounce and roll across the hood to the ground. Half a second later, the sound of the third soldier’s scream reached them. It only lasted a moment.

The Pushpak’s engine cranked again and caught, the engine revving twice.

Now the Iranians were being cautious. He saw two of them peering out from either side of the gate, just their heads, one low and one high. Blake sighted on one and then the other, practiced the movement twice, and then did it for real, firing at either end of the tiny arc. The two distant figures fell toward one another, one soldier landing on the other. These two did not scream.

The Pushpak’s engine noise drew nearer.

“He comes,” Zari said behind him. “Hormoz: he is moving again.”

“Okay.” Blake kept the scope on the open gate. Following the contour of the vehicle with his knee, he began moving toward the front bumper. “As soon as I tell you, get in and be ready to follow him. Don’t touch the brakes.”

Still following the outline of the vehicle with his leg, he walked next to the front bumper and then, once it ran out, crossed back toward the passenger door. The gate was still just a blank rectangle of light in his scope. The optics were so good he could make out the texture of the house’s wall through the gate. There wasn’t so much as a shadow moving; no one was trying to follow the five men who already came through. To make sure the Iranians continued to keep their heads down, Blake fired one last round through the open gate.

“Okay.” He jumped in the Toyota and shut the door. “Gun it.”

Zari drove like someone accustomed to the desert, picking up speed smoothly, with a minimum of wheel-spin. Blake turned and watched the back gate to the Warshowsky compound; there was still no movement and he noted with satisfaction that the dust behind them was dark; Zari was keeping her foot off the brake.

Blake watched until the distant gate was just a distant dot of light. Then he turned and settled in his seat. It took him several seconds to pick out Pardivari’s SUV, bouncing and rocking in the darkness just ahead. But Zari followed the lead vehicle’s every move, driving less than fifty feet off his rear bumper.

Blake glanced back again. “How far to the wadi?”

“At this speed?” Zari kept her eyes on Pardivari’s vehicle as she spoke. “Ten minutes. Maybe less.”

“Let’s hope for less. We’re going to have everything in this district with boots, wheels, or wings following us . . . just as soon as those folks back there make a radio call.”

“They probably think we are trying to make the Iraqi border. That, or drop down and go back to the village to change trucks and try to get on the highway, head for the sea. The wadi will take us north and then east, and east is the direction they will least expect us to take.”

“That’s what we’re hoping.” Blake admired the way she grasped it.

The Land Cruiser lifted, dropped, and then lifted again as they crossed a dip in the terrain.

“Thank you.” Zari glanced his way, just for a moment. “What you did back there . . . you kept us—Farookh and me—from being captured. That was very brave.”

“It’s my job. And you did well.”

The young woman drove in silence for several seconds.

“What,” she asked, “will become of Olga?”

Blake checked the desert behind them. It was dark, empty as far as he could see.

“That depends on what story she tells them. If she says we forced our way in, threatened her . . . if she’s convincing, maybe not much of anything happens. Maybe house arrest.”

Zari glanced his way. “You do not believe that.”

“I hope it.”

He could see her blinking back tears in the starlight as she drove.

“She needs our help,” Zari said. “She is in danger. We must go back.”

“Zari, you tried to convince her to come with us. She refused.”

Now the tears were running down her face. “But they have her. And we have guns.”

“We have two guns,” Blake agreed. “And they still have the rest of an infantry squad back there at the compound; maybe eight soldiers. They’ve already made a radio call by now, and they probably have a full platoon, probably a full company, inbound for the house. We’d be two guns trying to take a fortified position, held by a superior force. They’d kill us all. And if the man in that truck up there does not make it out of the country, you’re talking a war that could easily kill Olga and every other person in this province.”

“Yes,” Zari said, “I told Farrokh the same thing.”

“Then you know what our priorities are.”

Zari drove, saying nothing.

“Olga’s smart,” Blake told her. “If anyone can pull through this, she can.”

Zari kept driving. Over the sound of the engine, Blake could hear her sniffling.

He turned and scanned the dark horizon behind him. There was still no light, no sign of a pursuer of any kind.

The Land Cruiser decelerated, its engine growling at a higher pitch as Zari downshifted.

Blake turned, looking through the windshield. “What’s up?”

“Hormoz slows.” Zari nodded at the vehicle ahead of them. “I am using the transmission to slow as well, a lower gear, so we do not show the brake light. I think we have reached the entry to the wadi.”

Blake could barely make out Pardivari’s SUV through the windshield. He leaned his head and shoulders out the window so he could see better.

Ahead of them, the shadowed back end of the Pushpak tipped forward nearly forty-five degrees; it looked as if the little SUV was driving off the brink of a cliff. The vehicle hesitated for a moment and then lumbered forward. It was like watching a ship sink into a dark desert sea.

“Well,” Blake said. “I can see why not many people know how to get into this wadi.”

As Blake watched, Zari drove up to the brink of the wadi. She gradually applied the parking brake until they came to a stop.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We can follow him.”

Zari looked at him. Her cheeks were still wet with tears. “I know. I am giving him time to get clear.”

She slipped the clutch and the Land Cruiser crept forward, dipping down steeply. In a moment, Blake had both hands against the dash, bracing to keep himself from crashing face-first into the windshield.

The engine moaned and the transmission whined in protest as the SUV dropped forward.

“Brakes,” Blake said, “would be good.”

“No. I do not wish to show the lights.”

They bottomed and she cranked the wheel hard right. The Land Cruiser tipped a little, and the action nearly threw Blake across the shifter and into her lap. They settled back onto all four wheels with a squeak of springs.

“Sorry.” Blake’s face was no more than an inch from hers. She glanced his way, moving her eyes only. Even in the dark, she had amazing eyes.

“It is understandable.” She looked forward. “Hormoz is moving. To keep him in sight, I must drive.”

“Sorry.”

“Yes. You said that already.”

Blake slid back into his seat and the Land Cruiser began to move forward again.

The night appeared even blacker than before and, leaning out the SUV’s window, he could more sense than see the near wall of the wadi. In the dim starlight, everything around him was shadow, but he had the feeling that, were he to lean from the window and stretch out his arm, he could touch the crumbling, eroding earth and sandstone of the wall.

Just ahead of them, he could hear the Pushpak as it ground along the dry stream bed, stones crunching under its tires or spitting to the sides and striking the hard-packed Earth of the gully walls. But he had to glance to the side, using his more light-sensitive peripheral vision, to make out the shape of the little SUV ahead of them, and even then it was nothing more than a rocking, blurred, slate-gray shadow. He settled back in his seat.

“You can see well enough to drive?”

“Shhhh.” Zari’s head did not turn as she shushed him; at least, he was fairly certain it did not turn. “I must . . . need . . . concentrate.”

Blake went quiet and let the young woman attend to her task.

For the next hour-and-a-half, neither one of them said a word. They kept their windows down, and the night air was dusty, but a few degrees cooler than it was when they fled the house. Blake alternated his gaze between the sky in the top quarter of the windshield, the sky above the dark wadi, and what he could see through the dusty glass of the rear hatch.

It was nothing but darkness and stars. Then he saw something; the briefest glimpse of a tiny red light.

“Zari,” he said, his voice even and calm. “Push in the clutch, put us in neutral, and let us roll to a stop.”

“But Hormoz . . .”

“He’s monitoring you in the rear-view. He’ll stop with you. Go to neutral, now.”

She did and Blake opened the door and stepped outside. The distant red light blinked across the wadi far behind them again. And he could hear the distant whump-whump-whump of rotor noise.

Looking up, he could see the brink of the wadi against the star-strewn sky. But when he reached out to touch the wall, his hand closed on thin air. He reached over his head and, just above his head, felt crumbling Earth and stone. Following it, he walked away from the Land Cruiser; he got about five feet before it began to slope downward.

Blake walked back to the passenger-side window.

“The bank here is undercut,” he told Zari. “Crank your wheel right and pull in slowly; we want to get the entire hood under the bank if we can. But go slow . . . if this bank collapses on us, we’re not going anywhere.”

“But Hormoz . . .”

“He’ll do what we do. Go ahead.”

She did as he asked. He could see the dim, fuzzy outline of Pardivari’s Pushpak mimicking their action. In less than twenty seconds, both vehicles were partially hidden by the undercut bank.

“Okay,” Blake said, getting back inside, glad there was no interior light. “Cut the engine.”

This time she obeyed without question. The sound of the rotor blades drew nearer.

“The back ends of the vehicles,” Zari said after a minute. “They can be seen from the air.”

“I know.” Blake pulled the pistol from his waistband, ejected the magazine, pushed down on the top round to make sure it was full, and slid the mag back into the grip of the pistol. “But all we’ve seen so far of that helicopter is anti-collision lights. They’re not using a searchlight. Artesh—the Iranian army—has night-vision capability, but the newest stuff, what NATO uses, is embargoed. They can’t get it here. So they’re probably using thermal imagery to look for us; they have that. With the hood under the bank like this, we have a good four or five feet of insulation between us and their equipment. And with the engine shut off, we’re not emitting a warm exhaust plume.”

“So they can’t see us?”

Blake shook his head. Then he shook it again; it was so dark there was no way Zari could see him.

“They can,” he admitted. He reached back to retrieve the sniper rifle, remembering he’d already used six rounds from the only magazine he had for it; that left one in the chamber and three in the mag. He reached back and found the two blankets as well. “But they’ll have to be at the right angle and they’ll need to have the sensitivity set so low they’d be getting a lot of false hits on rocks still warm from the day. We’re not completely invisible. But we’ve lowered our risk of being detected.”

“And if they do see us?”

“Then we fight. Stay here.” He opened the door and, leaving it opened, scuttled under the overhang and away from the vehicles, the blankets in one hand, sniper rifle in the other.

Blake resigned himself to using vision as little as possible. He remembered what an older master sergeant, a Vietnam veteran, taught him in SERE—Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training: In Vietnam, helicopter gun crews learned to look behind the aircraft, rather than in front of it, because the Vietcong would hide as the helicopter was approaching, and then come out to look up and follow it as it flew away. Against the green underbrush, their faces would show up: “like targets” was the way the master sergeant put it.

In the dark, Blake faced the same dilemma. If he could see the helicopter, then his face was exposed, and his face was a heat source. It would show as a bright white oval to standard military thermal imaging equipment. And while he could mask that with the thick, wool blankets, they would only work for a minute, maybe less; after that, the wool of the blankets would warm from his body heat and he would be visible once again.

He put the blankets in the hollow at the base of the wadi wall, where they would remain as cool as possible, and tucked himself against the wall a few feet away. Then he kept his head down and listened: the helicopter seemed to be crisscrossing the wadi, overflying it as part of a more general search pattern.

Blake shut his eyes, concentrating on the sound. It was only one helicopter; he was certain of that, and the deeper tone of the rotor noise suggested it was a larger gunship. That meant at least a certain amount of armor, heavy machine guns, probably rockets as well, and a crew of three—at least three and possibly more.

He took a breath and listened. Against something like that, the 7.62 millimeter sniper rifle in his hands was like a peashooter. And the 9 millimeter pistol—the firearm for which he had the most ammunition—was even less effective.

Blake pictured their route to this point. Since they’d entered the wadi, Polaris—the North Star—had been visible most of the time, a tiny pinpoint of light about 33 degrees above the horizon, just over Pardivari’s SUV as they drove up the wadi. That meant the wadi was still running north-south and had not taken its turn to the east. Since it wasn’t on most maps, there was a good chance the crew in the chopper didn’t know the wadi eventually turned east; that would make it seem unlikely to them as an escape route. As Zari said, any Artesh and Pasdaran forces searching this far north would probably assume they were making an oblique run for the border.

The rotor noise approached rapidly, overflew him, and receded, the Doppler effect making the pitch drop as the helicopter passed. He watched the tritium second hand on his watch: a long seven minutes passed and then the helicopter overflew them again, farther up the wadi, just past the vehicles, the rotor noise diminishing. Less than a minute later he heard it pick up in volume again, farther north still, going the opposite direction. Then it died away.

Blake waited. The desert night was as quiet as any environment he’d ever been in. It wasn’t like the woods at night back home in Virginia. There were no bird-sounds, no animals calling to one another, no leaves being rustled by the breeze. This far away from habitation, there weren’t even any flocks, so no goats or sheep bleated. It was eerily close to totally silent. He heard a soft creak from the direction of the vehicles; possibly someone shifting inside one of them, making it settle on its suspension. It was impossible to be sure.

He thought about the rotor noise and what it told him. Seven minutes between passes going west-to-east, but less than one minute going east-to-west: that meant the aircrew was using the wadi as the eastern border of their search grid, making a turn after they passed it, and then searching the open desert to the west. It made sense; they would see the steep wadi as a barrier, impossible to cross in a wheeled vehicle.

Seven minutes on the dot, he heard the helicopter again, quite distant this time. It flew west-to-east and the rotor noise faded away completely.

Blake watched the luminous second hand circle his watch. A minute passed and he did not hear the sound of the helicopter return. But he did hear something else: the crunch of gravel against gravel.

Footsteps. Someone was walking his way: trying to be silent, and almost succeeding.

Blake opened his mouth to exhale slowly. It was more noiseless than breathing through his nose and the night was so silent he didn’t want to risk any sound at all. He lifted the sniper rifle completely clear of the ground and—carefully, noiselessly—aimed in the direction of the footsteps. He kept his finger on the trigger guard, conscious of the fact that both the Pushpak and the Land Cruiser were somewhere off in the shadows, in the background of any shot he might take.

The footsteps came nearer and then passed him, walking further down the wadi. Five feet past, they stopped.

“Hello?” It was Zari. “Are you there?”

“Zari.” Blake relaxed. “You should have stayed with the truck; I nearly shot you.”

“But the helicopter’s gone. Why aren’t we moving?”

“The helicopter is past us. It isn’t gone. If the search began where they last had contact with us, at the Warshowsky’s, then it stands to reason that they’ll head back to their start point. I don’t want to be detectable when they do that.”

“Oh.” He could hear her turn to face his voice. “I am sorry. I will return to the . . .”

They both heard it at the same time: the helicopter returning, the rotor noise growing. It wasn’t going back and forth; it was running south, coming straight down the wadi. Quickly.

Blake dropped the rifle and, rising, reached out at the shadow that was Zari. His right arm closed around her hip and waist and, reaching up with his left hand to protect her head, he pulled her to the ground.

“What . . . ?”

“Don’t move,” Blake told her. He reached out, grabbed both of the blankets, and pulled them over the two of them. The rotor noise rose to a palpable thunder and he trapped the far ends of the blanket with his booted feet.

“Don’t move a muscle.” Zari’s ear was less than six inches from his mouth, but he had to raise his voice to say it. “Stay still until I tell you it’s safe.”

When it didn’t seem as if the approaching helicopter noise could be any louder, it grew louder still. The blanket quivered as if trying to fly away and sand flew in under the edges, stinging the exposed skin of their faces and the backs of their hands. Blake pulled the girl nearer to him, trying to protect her with his body, gripping the blankets with both boot-tips and one hand, struggling to keep it from flipping up and revealing their warm bodies to the thermal imagery.

The helicopter thundered over, rotor wash beating down on them, the hurricane of wind reaching them even under the protected overhang. Blake could feel Zari’s body quivering against his as the helicopter passed. He held her more closely and she quieted.

Then the helicopter was gone, the rotor noise receding down the wadi. The chopper was flying so low the noise receded in less than a minute. And after it was gone, there was a long moment of nearly total silence, with Blake holding the girl and her breath warm against his cheek.

Blake pulled the blanket down. He could just barely see her face, but they were eye-to-eye, their lips less than a finger’s width apart.

“We’re safe now,” he told her, his voice a whisper. “That was their return leg; they’ve finished searching here. We can go.”

“Yes.” Then they got up, Blake retrieved his rifle, and they started back for the Toyota, guiding themselves in the dark by feeling for the wall of the wadi.

When they got there, they could hear that Pardivari already had his engine running, ready to go. Zari started the Land Cruiser as well.

“Look behind you, see where you want to go, and then close your eyes as you back up,” Blake told her. “That way you won’t lose your night vision when the back-up lamp comes on.”

She did it, backing in an arc and then pulling forward a few feet.

“Okay,” she told him. “I am in neutral again.”

“Keep your eyes closed. I’ll watch while Hormoz backs up and tell you when his light goes off.”

Blake squinted, but after better than two hours in near-total darkness, the light from the back of the little Pushpak seemed brilliant when Pardivari put it in reverse. The small SUV jumped back, then stalled, and then restarted and came the rest of the way back.

Some of the light reflected back from the front of their vehicle: enough that Blake could see no fewer than three bullet holes in the back of the Pushpak. One was in the bumper and two were in the window and it made him glad he took the shooter out. The man was obviously finding his target; a few seconds more and he had little doubt the Pasdaran rifleman would have killed both Pardivari and Nassiri.

Then the backup light went out, and all Blake could see was reddish-yellow afterimage, his night vision ruined. But it seemed to him that the Pushpak lurched again as it started forward. He wondered if its drivetrain was damaged.

If it was, there was nothing they could do; they’d just have to drive it until it dropped, push it to the side, and cram everyone into the Land Cruiser.

“Okay,” he told Zari. “We’re good. Hormoz is on the move. You can open your eyes and follow him.”

She put the Land Cruiser in gear and Blake could feel them start to move again. But feeling was about the only dependable sense he had; except for his peripheral vision, he could see nothing but amorphous blobs of afterimage. So he settled back, closed his eyes, and waited for his night vision to return.

For the next five minutes, there was nothing but the growl of the engine, the low whine of the transmission, and the sound of rocks popping out from beneath the partially deflated tires.

‘Thank you again,” Zari said. “That was stupid of me, coming back to look for you. But the helicopter was gone so long, I thought perhaps you fell and were hurt.”

“You couldn’t have known. I hope I didn’t hurt you when I pulled you down with me.”

“You did not,” she said. “Actually, it was rather . . .”

But she didn’t finish the sentence and Blake wasn’t sure what to say after that, so they drove on in silence.

After twenty minutes, the wadi turned to the east. And twenty minutes after that, the wadi walls began to slop back further and further until soon the stream bed was running down the center of something that was barely a depression in the ground.

Now, in order to see Polaris, Blake had to lean out of the window and look over the top of the Land Cruiser’s roof, sighting through the tubular aluminum roof rack. And when the wadi began to angle toward the southeast, Pardivari drove straight up the gently angled bank and onto the ground beyond.

Zari followed him. In moments, the noise of gravel disappeared and the dust around them grew thicker; they were driving on sand. But it was open sand, and Zari shifted up until they were running in top gear.

She coughed and then coughed a second time, and Blake shifted in his seat, taking his bandanna out of his hip pocket.

“Here,” he said, taking the wheel with his other hand. “I’ve got us. Knot that around your face. It’ll keep some of the dust out.”

“What about you?”

“I’m not driving. I can breathe through my sleeve, if I have to.”

She accepted the bandanna and brushed his arm a couple of times as he held the wheel and she put the handkerchief on, bank-robber style. Then they drove in dust for another ten minutes until they left the sand and got onto more packed Earth. Things began to settle and with his eyes now accustomed to the dark, Blake saw Zari pull the bandanna down and leave it around her neck, like a cowboy’s neckerchief. He could barely see her, but she looked like a woman on an adventure.

She looked his way and then back at the SUV. “Is Hormoz leaving with you?”

“With us?” Blake’s lips were caked with dust. He had to wet them to speak. “That’s up to him. He’s done a pretty good job of staying off the radar for the past two years, but things are going to get pretty hot here, now. I’m hoping he comes back with us.”

She nodded and drove without speaking for better than a minute. Then she glanced at Blake again.

“If he doesn’t go . . . if he decides to stay . . .” She turned to face ahead, looking through the windshield again. “. . . then I will stay here. With Hormoz.”

Blake exhaled through his nose, the dust making a sound as he did it. “Zari, that wouldn’t be wise. As far as we know, the Pasdaran thinks Hormoz is dead. They’re under no such illusions when it comes to you. You’re a wanted woman. Anywhere you go in Iran, in any country that has relations with Iran, that’s going to be the case.”

She looked straight ahead, giving no indication she heard what he said.

“You knew that when you and your father proposed this, Zari.”

“Yes.” When she turned his way again, he could see the tears had returned. “Yes, I knew. But I did not know I would place Olga in danger . . . not in danger such as this. When we used her house, I thought no one would know, or if they did, they would hear it later, but it would be all right. Anatoly does not speak to his family, but I understand he takes care of them, keeps the government from troubling them.”

She pulled the bandanna up and wiped her eyes with it.

“But this,” she said. “This, not even Anatoly can fix. Olga will go to prison. The Pasdaran are animals; they will hurt her to make her talk. She might die. And don’t tell me having Farrokh makes it different. You have Farrokh, but Olga will still die. I cannot run away and let that happen.”

Blake let her get it all out. He reached over, touched her shoulder and squeezed gently, felt her soften beneath his touch.

“Zari, there’s nothing you can do, alone, to change things. If all of us went back right now, the most we could accomplish is to give them four more prisoners. The best thing you can do is come with us, help Farrokh in the debrief, and help move this forward on a diplomatic or a military basis.”

Zari shook her head. “We are leaving her. Abandoning her.”

“I know it seems that way, Zari. But this isn’t the sort of thing you can react to emotionally. If you do, it will blow up in your face and Olga won’t be any further ahead.”

She looked at him. Even in the darkness, he could see her eyes. “Then what do I do?”

“Get him safely onto the aircraft we’re meeting. Get him safely out of the country. Help him understand he’s made the right decision. Help get the information he’s carrying into the right hands.”

Zari drove. Blake couldn’t see her knuckles as she gripped the wheel but he knew that, if he could, they would be white.

“Olga knows what we’re doing.” Blake tried to keep his voice low, soothing. “She decided to help us. She decided to stay. This is not your fault. You did not do this to her.”

Zari put her right hand on the shifter, rested it there for a moment, and then struck the dash with the heel of her hand. She sniffed, the sound of a woman trying to weep silently.

“Farrokh will be on the plane,” she finally said. Now she did not try to disguise the fact that she was weeping. “We will get him out of Iran. Do not worry; I will help you.”

THE COUNTRY BECAME MORE rolling again. In the dim starlight, Blake could see low scrub vegetation dotting the sand-white countryside and Zari steered expertly through it, following Pardivari and mimicking his every move.

They began going downhill, then stayed on the flat for better than ten minutes. After that, it was all gentle uphill for another five, before the land around them began to level out, and the surrounding vegetation thinned out.

Zari began to downshift and Blake sat up. “We’re there?”

“We are here.” She opened her door. “I must go to Farrokh. He is not accustomed to sitting for so long. His arthritis; he will be stiff.”

“Sure.” Blake opened his own door and got the sniper rifle from the back seat. Then he went around to the rear hatch, and opened it and grabbed his rucksack. He looked at his watch.

“Hormoz,” he called. “Dust-off in thirty minutes. We’d better get all this stuff staged, ready to go.”

There was no answer. He turned and looked at the Pushpak; Zari had Nassiri outside and was letting him lean on her as he walked, the pain in his steps obvious. But Pardivari was nowhere to be seen.

“Hormoz?”

Blake turned and walked over to the Pushpak, sitting with its engine off thirty feet away.

As he neared, even in the starlight, he could see the gray-rimmed pocks of bullet holes marking the SUV’s side panels. Hormoz was still in the driver’s seat, slumped forward. Blake ran the last ten feet and opened the door.

The missionary turned, pain etched on his face. “It’s my leg. Left.”

Blake fished in his pocket and came out with a small tactical flashlight, pressing the button on the bottom. From his shin down, Pardivari’s leg was sticky and wet with blood. And on the floor, nearly a quarter inch of blood was pooled on the floorpan.

“Farrokh doesn’t know,” Pardivari said. “Truth be told, I didn’t know I was hit until we got to the wadi and I went to push on the clutch. And by then, I figured I better keep my mouth shut; didn’t want to freak the old man out. He’s in so much pain, I don’t think he noticed much about me, anyhow. I asked him if he was all right when we got restarted at the Warshowsky’s and when the helicopter passed, and he said he was okay both times. But other than that, he hasn’t said a word.”

Blake lifted the man’s blood-wet pant leg and looked at the wound.

“Through and through,” he told Pardivari. “But it took out at least part of the bone. We’re going to have to splint you before we try moving you. Hang tight.”

He ran back to the Land Cruiser, got his rucksack, and ran it back. What he had inside wasn’t anything like the medic bag one member of a Special Forces team would always carry, but it had what he needed: a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, gauze squares, a squeeze bottle of sterile water, a blood-stopper bandage, a pair of surgical snips, and an air splint.

“Okay,” he told Hormoz. “I’ve got to turn you so your legs are outside the door.”

“Sounds painful.”

“I’m sure that’s an understatement. Here goes.”

Blake reached in and lifted Pardivari by both knees, the missionary groaning in agony as he did it, but pushing up with his arms to help at the same time.

“I’d give you morphine, but I need you awake.”

“Understood. You don’t want me dropping off into shock.”

Blake held the flashlight in his mouth while he used the surgical snips to cut away the man’s boot, his stocking, and the lower half of his pant leg. Then he emptied most of the hydrogen peroxide onto the shin and foot, used three of the gauze squares to wipe most of the blood away, rinsed everything with sterile water, dried it with gauze, checked to make sure the bleeding had slowed, and wiped everything with bacitracin cream. He wrapped the blood-stopper bandage with its coagulant surfaces around the wound and then, admiring the missionary’s stoic silence, slid the air splint over Pardivari’s foot and tugged it almost all the way up to his knee. Then he blew into the air splint until it was firm and inflexible, stoppered it, and checked it for leaks.

When he looked up, both Zari and Nassiri were looking down at what he was doing.

“Will he be all right?” Zari asked.

Pardivari laughed. “Little darlin’, I’m afraid I won’t be taking you dancing anytime soon, but I’ll live.”

“I did not know,” Nassiri muttered.

“He didn’t want you worried,” Blake told him. “Here: you two keep him company for a few minutes while I empty out the backs of the trucks.”

They did and in less than five minutes Blake had their few belongings stacked in a small heap in front of the trucks. He kept his rucksack separate; he’d need it for what was coming next. Then he squatted next to Pardivari’s door.

“We’d better all be on our feet when the dust-off comes. They see anybody sitting in a vehicle, they might think we’ve been captured, being used for a trap. Just keep all your weight on me and your good leg. I’ll walk you up to the fender.”

“You got it.”

Blake was fully prepared for him to black out when he stood up; he’d lost a lot of blood. But Pardivari merely grunted.

“You are one tough old bird,” Blake told him as they walked to the front of the truck, where Blake half-sat him against the fender.

“One of those two things is true.” Pardivari laughed and then he groaned.

“You keep talking to us, you hear? Don’t doze off.”

“Doze off? Y’all kidding? We’re havin’ an adventure here. This here stuff’s exciting.”

Zari and Nassiri joined them and for two minutes, the four were clustered and silent, as if gathering in prayer. Blake assumed that was what the others were doing; he was. Then Blake made a quick check of the wind direction. There was a slight breeze coming from the west—not enough to have any impact on the landing of the incoming aircraft. He reached into the side pocket of his rucksack and fished out a small red filter for his penlight. He knew a military aircrew was going to expect a “ SAFE TO LAND” signal from the ground. He placed the filter on his light and tested it by blinking several times in rapid succession.

Then he heard it: a low drone, almost like the sound of a distant semi traveling down a country highway.

Within seconds, the others heard it as well. They turned toward it and Pardivari winced as he did, but the sky to the west was black, interrupted only by the low shadows of the distant mountains and the stars. Blake steadied the wounded man to keep him on his feet.

Then they appeared: two dim, adjacent circles of pale green, growing larger in the western sky. As the four of them watched, the circles became squat and elongated, slowly transforming into ovals. Nassiri uttered a single word in Farsi, something Blake didn’t understand.

“What did he say?”

“‘Aliens’,” Pardivari said. “He said it looks like aliens.”

“He’s pretty close,” Blake told him. “They’re Marines.”