Greg Rucka - A gentleman_s game

In addition to the guns, they each carried a GPS unit and a knife on their person, and that was it. Nothing else was truly needed, at least not yet, and as soon as Chace had the bearing, she rose to her feet and indicated their desired direction. They spread out, putting twenty feet or so between each other, and began walking. They moved as quickly as silence would allow.

There was no moon, but the stars were brilliant and gave off a surprising amount of light, and she felt better about the fact that they had forgone NVG, relying on their eyes alone. She remembered a story from the SOE days, before the Special Operations Executive had transitioned to become SIS, during the Second World War, when agents had been taught to keep one eye closed during night maneuvers. It was the kind of detail that stayed with you, and she wondered at it, wondered at the way the mind could detach from the action surrounding it.

The terrain was even for the most part, and barren, and she had expected sand and was mildly disappointed that there wasn't much of it to be found. They made good time, and when they reached the cache and found the canister lying on its side, its self-deploying camouflage blanket making it look like nothing more than a large rock, Chace slid back her sleeve to check her watch. Oh-one-fifty-nine.

She stood watch while Wallace broke open the canister, removing the backpacks first, and set about loading them. He divided the claymores evenly, eight for each of them, as well as the det cord and the timers. When he had loaded both backpacks, he dug out the extra magazines for the P90s, handed three of them to Chace, kept the remaining three for himself.

Two hundred rounds apiece, sixteen claymores, Chace mused.

If that wasn't going to be enough to get the job done, she didn't know what more would've.

The backpacks loaded and closed, Wallace reached into the canister again, this time removing two plastic bottles of water, factory sealed, labels removed. He cracked one, drank it down, then closed the bottle and returned it to the canister before getting to his feet and offering the other to Chace. She drank it while he stood watch, then repeated his procedure, putting it back where he'd found it. Inside the canister were another sixteen bottles and six MREs, to be used later, on the exfil.

Getting out was as important as getting in, after all.

The plan, as it stood, had them hitting the camp in the next ninety minutes, returning to the cache before dawn for resupply. After loading up on the food and water, they would strike out to the west, making for the GPS coordinates Borovsky had supplied, across the border with Jordan. It was an eighty-six kilometer hike and would take them the better part of two days to accomplish. Once they reached the lift site, they would wait for pickup, scheduled twice every twenty-four hours, at twenty-two hundred and oh-four hundred.

They had no radios because radios wouldn't do them any good. Who were they going to call but each other?

Chace closed the canister, let the camouflage blanket fall back over it, blurring its lines once more. She hoisted her pack, feeling the thirty-six pounds of landmines on her back, a substantial weight but not an unmanageable one.

Wallace was watching her, and Chace moved her P90 to a low-carry, nodded, and they struck out again, this time for the camp.

Ready to kill.

Saudi Arabia-Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan 22 September 0146 Local (GMT+3.00)

"I told you to take it slowly," Matteen said.

Sinan shot a glare at him, then turned the look on the front right tire of the SUV, deflated and useless.

"Get the spare and the jack," Sinan said.

Matteen sighed, gesturing around them at the expanse of sand. "We can wait until dawn, Sinan. We can sleep in the car."

"I want to get home."

"You wanting to get home is why we have a flat tire in the middle of the desert."

"Fine, I'll do it." Sinan threw his Kalashnikov onto the backseat of the Land Cruiser, went around to the back, opened the hatch. Matteen followed after a moment, grumbling, then reached inside to help him free the spare. They rolled it around the side of the vehicle, loosened the bolts on the flat tire, and then set about raising the car with the jack.

It had taken them far longer to get out of Egypt than it had to get in, and Sinan had been surprised by how swiftly and how viciously the Egyptian authorities had responded to the bombing, for all the effect Nia's death had had. It puzzled him, and it puzzled Matteen, and it was only by Allah's grace, Sinan was sure, that they had not been stopped in the airport in Cairo, where they had boarded the flight south to Hurghada.

Their contact had met them in Port Safaga and put them up for the night, then brought them to the fishing boat that would take them to Duba.

It was in Port Safaga that they learned what had happened to Muhriz el-Sayd, how he had been murdered by the police.

"They take our best from us," Sinan had lamented. "They take our best, again and again, and we make no gains."

"Our gains are not for this world but the next, Sinan," Matteen had answered. "Do not lose your faith."

Sinan hadn't responded, dwelling once more on Nia, telling himself he had done what he had to do, that he had done what was required of him. She hadn't left him a choice.

They'd crossed the Red Sea and made port in Duba, finding the SUV where Abdul Aziz had promised them it would be, the keys in the hands of a local imam who fed them and prayed with them before sending them on their way with their rifles once more at their sides. The drive was a long one, and while they made good time on the immaculate and barren highways for the first part of it, as they closed in on the camp the going was slower, and they were required to leave the roads. Before night fell, they stopped and prayed.

"Let's wait until morning, Sinan," Matteen had suggested. "I don't like driving in the dark."

"I want to get back home."

"If we get hung up on a rock or boulder, we'll end up stuck out here and have to walk."

"Allah will not let that happen," Sinan had said simply, and then climbed back behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser. • They had the tire changed in only a few minutes, and Sinan's dour mood was only slightly helped by the fact that Matteen didn't say "I told you so."

Once the flat was stowed, along with the tools, Sinan moved to get behind the wheel, but this time Matteen stopped him.

"No, I'll take it for a while."

"I can drive."

"I know you can drive, Sinan, but you're impatient, and we only had the one spare. We'll get there when we get there."

Sinan thought about digging in, being stubborn. Instead, he moved around to the passenger's seat, climbing in, waiting while Matteen got behind the wheel. The engine came back to life without hesitation and the headlights splashed onto the baked earth.

"I just want to go home," Sinan said to no one in particular.

Saudi Arabia-Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan 22 September 0222 Local (GMT+3.00)

It took another hour, because they went much more slowly now. Both Wallace and Chace had agreed that it was unlikely HUM-AA was expecting trouble or that there would be static defenses in place. Certainly, there would be sentries, but they were dealing with a training camp, one where the trainees and the trainers felt secure in their work. The residents were there to learn and to train, their days would be full, their nights dedicated to rest.

But Chace and Wallace weren't going to take any chances.

They climbed down into the actual physical wadi, roughly two kilometers from the camp, picking their way down the sides, cautious with their footfalls, and once at the bottom stopped and took stock. The sides of the wadi rose roughly three meters on either side, and where they had entered was narrow, perhaps only four meters across. The ground beneath their feet was hard earth, cleaned by the rare floods that rushed through it in the spring. Chace saw tire tracks but had no idea how recent they were.