First of all I would like to thank my pals in the Clive Cussler Society for their continued support and for encouraging me to write a book on my own. Here it is, gang! I’m grateful to Wayne Valero, president and founder of the CCCS, for his insightful suggestions on how to improve the pile of pages I sent him. My line editor Gabe Robinson cut away thousands of words that were cluttering up the manuscript, but the surgery vastly improved the flow of my deathless prose. A special thanks to Clive Cussler who taught me during our NUMA Files collaboration to strive for a fresh point of view and avoid writing clichés like the plague. Oops! Many thanks to John and Shannon Raab at Suspense publishing for this opportunity to bring forth my first solo effort since the NUMA Files. I especially appreciate Shannon’s enthusiasm, astute editorial and art sense, and her help in navigating my way around the new world of e-books and blog chats. And thanks to my wife Christi for constantly reminding me during those down spells that I am better than I think I am.

The desert monster appeared in a glittering vortex of golden dust.

The caravan’s lead scout saw the creature first. The scout had been riding a hundred yards ahead of the mile-long column of horses, camels, merchants and religious pilgrims. His head cover was pulled down over his forehead and wrapped around the lower part of his face. He was bent over the neck of his horse, squinting through the narrow opening as he scoured the high desert for the tracks of previous caravans.

The moaning wind had ramped up to a sudden squall, creating a dancing curtain of whirling dust devils. The movement caught the scout’s eye. He lifted his head and saw an amorphous shape loom in the diffused sunlight, waving its appendages like the sails of a windmill.

The hulking form that emerged from the swirling cloud was bigger than the average-sized man. The head was silvery and flat on top. The face was a fiery orange-red. Metallic scales covered the body.

As the thing staggered toward the scout, it emitted a bellow like a wounded bull.

The scout was a seasoned warrior, but the tortured wail was like nothing his ears had ever heard. The hair bristled on the back of his neck and a bird-like squawk escaped from deep in his throat.

Unnerved by the blowing dust wraiths, the horse let out a pitiful whinny and reared up in fright, pawing the air with its hooves. The scout clamped his legs onto the horse’s haunches and shouted for help.

The quartet of Persian mercenaries at the head of the caravan heard the wind-muted cry and saw the threatening figure advancing through the blowing sand. Four curved swords snicked from their leather scabbards.

With the guard sergeant taking the lead, the Persians swept past the scout. As the warriors closed in for the kill, the intruder stopped in its tracks, teetered as if being tugged in a dozen directions, took a step, stopped again and toppled over backwards.

The sergeant reined in his horse and slipped from his saddle. He cautiously approached the immobile hulk and lowered his sword. The creature lying on the sands was not a monster. It was a man. Or what was left of a man.

Master Philip was in a foul mood. The special emissary of Pope Alexander III hunched over a crude wooden table, quill pen poised above a blank sheet of parchment, a look of sheer agony on his face. He was struggling to find a diplomatic choice of words that would tell the Pope he’d sent Philip on a fool’s errand.

He had done his best to warn the Pope. Before leaving Rome he had pleaded with Alexander one last time. “I am the papal physician, not a soldier or an adventurer,” Philip had argued. “I have been trained to deal with black bile and phlegm. There are men far better suited than I to carry out your wishes.”

The Pope had rejected the impassioned plea. “There is no one I would trust more for this crucial mission, Master Philip. You have the qualities I most demand. You are my friend as well as my physician. We need help to defeat the infidels beating at our door. The fate of Christendom may hinge on your success.”

“All the more reason, Your Holiness, to find someone more qualified than I,” Philip had countered.

Alexander had said, “Have you no faith in God?”

“In God, yes. In myself, no.”

“Be not afraid.” The Pope had hung a golden cross around Philip’s neck. “I had this made to remind you that God moves in mysterious ways,” he soothed.

With the Pope’s blessing still echoing in his ears, Philip sailed from Venice across the Mediterranean to Palestine carrying a letter seeking an alliance with Prester John, the mysterious ruler of a far-off Eastern kingdom. Unfortunately, the location of Prester John’s kingdom was a mystery. Not long after arriving in Jerusalem, Philip came to a reluctant conclusion. His mission was doomed to fail.

It went beyond his personal doubts. He had talked to dozens of people about the lands to the east. Day after day he had sat in his modest Jerusalem apartment and listened with growing apprehension to their hair-raising stories of travel over vast distances through unforgiving terrain, and about their encounters with blood-thirsty natives and roving bands of robbers. The conversations had convinced Phillip that his earlier misgivings were not without foundation.

He brought the quill to the parchment and waited for God to move his pen hand. But the quavering voice he heard came not from the Deity.

“Someone is here to see you, master,” said his man servant, who stood in the doorway.

A bull-dog scowl came to Philip’s lips. “I’m busy,” he snapped.

“But Sire, I’m afraid—”

A huge hand encased in chain mail swept the servant aside like a piece of straw and a giant of a man squeezed through the doorway into the room. The stranger towered several inches over six feet. His face was hidden for the most part under a wild beard of fiery red. He filled the chamber with his bulk and unpleasant smell. A long sword hung in a scabbard diagonally across his wide chest.

The man removed a pot-shaped helmet from his neck and cradled it in his arms. Then he dropped onto one knee and pushed the mail hood back from his bowed head, revealing thick red hair that hung in uneven bangs over his forehead.

Philip felt as if he were in the presence of a creature that had sprung from a tale meant to frighten bad children.

His vocal cords seemed frozen, but he managed a loud whisper. “Who are you?”

“Thomas, son of Thomas,” the giant rumbled.

Philip’s gaze went to the red cross sewn onto the patched white tunic over the chain mail coat known as a hauberk. The symbol was the insignia of a Crusader.

He was regaining his composure. “You have taken up the Cross, I see.”

Speaking in heavily-accented Latin, Thomas said, “I would take it up again to defend the Holy Land.”

Philip was aware that Jerusalem swarmed with violent men like Thomas who had found themselves without employment after they had captured the city from the Saracens. He guessed that the knight was offering to hire out the long sword.

“I have no need of mercenaries,” Philip said, speaking in English.

The massive head slowly lifted. Cunning lurked in the hard blue eyes.

“Perhaps not, sire. But have you need of someone who can lead you to the Prester?”

So that was this brute’s game. Philip fumed at the boldness of the man. Word of his mission and his willingness to pay for information had quickly circulated in the ancient city.

“It is no secret in Jerusalem that I seek Prester John,” Philip said, making no effort to hide the annoyance in his voice.

“But none of the others who have heard of your quest can show you the way.”

“I suppose you have a map that you wish to sell,” Philip scoffed.

“No map,” Thomas said. “But I can lead you to the Prester’s kingdom with a lodestone.”

Thomas slipped a mail glove off his hand, reached under his tunic and came out with a rough-cut emerald around a half-inch across cradled in the creases of his massive palm.

Philip took the emerald from the knight’s hand and studied the green stone in a shaft of light slanting through a small window. The uncut gem was of the highest quality.

“Where did you get this little bauble?” Philip said, acting as if he were only mildly curious.

“From a Greek merchant who acquired it in the Prester’s kingdom.”

Philip passed the emerald back.

“Get off your knee, Thomas son of Thomas. Sit on that stool and try not to break it.” He turned the hour glass over on his desk. “You have until the bottom is half full.”

Thomas eased his great bulk onto the creaking stool and told Philip how he had haggled over the emerald in the Constantinople bazaar. The gem merchant was vague about the source of the stone, saying only that it was east of Babylon. Intrigued, Thomas began to frequent other bazaars. He noticed emeralds of similarly unusual beauty and started a discrete inquiry as to their origin. He found a common thread. The handful of merchants who sold the gems had all been on caravans that traveled far to the east on a trade route known to be long and extremely hazardous. He went back to the Greek.

“And this merchant simply came out and told you he had reached the Kingdom of Prester John?” Philip said, not trying to hide his skepticism.

“No, sire. I had to persuade him.”

Philip glanced at the knight’s club-like hands. Thomas obviously had formidable powers of persuasion. The Greek said his supplier told him only that the gems came from a distant eastern kingdom ruled by a Christian. A handful of traders knew the way and they keep it secret.

Philip listened long after the sand had drained from the top of the hour glass. Thomas had a simple plan. Join a caravan. Identify the emerald merchants heading east of Babylon. When they neared their destination he would persuade the merchants to show the way to Prester John.

“We would travel together, you and I?”

Thomas nodded. “I have six loyal men who would follow me to Hell.”

“And what is the cost of this journey to Hades?”

“All expenses and a fair cut of future emerald trade.”

Philip’s hand went to the gold cross that hung from his neck. He knew it would be madness to join a group of untamed mercenaries on a dangerous journey to nowhere. On the other hand, he was desperate. The Pope would not accept an excuse.

He wrinkled his nose; he supposed he would get used to the man’s foul odor in time. “When can we leave?” he said.

“The caravan is assembling outside the city and will depart in a week.” Thomas hesitated. “I’ll need money for supplies and to buy a place in the caravan.”

Philip gave him a handful of coins from a leather purse. “Keep in mind that even the Pope’s purse has a bottom,” he warned.

Thomas handed him the emerald. “This will ensure my return.”

After Thomas left, Philip placed the emerald in a strong box. Before he closed the lid, he took out the folded letter inside and gazed at the Papal seal. Pope Alexander was right. God had answered his prayers by sending Thomas as His emissary. A faint smile crossed Philip’s lips. The Pope said that God moved in mysterious ways, but he hadn’t mentioned that the Almighty had a keen sense of humor.

Philip joined the caravan posing as a rich pilgrim traveling with his bodyguards. The arrangement aroused no suspicion. The caravans that plied the Asian trade routes were moving cities. Each with its own government, complete with bureaucrats and cooks. Private armies often accompanied merchants and traders.

Philip used Italian charm and gallons of wine to insinuate his way into this mix as the caravan plodded eastward. He identified a small group of gem traders and narrowed their number down to two close-mouthed merchants specializing in fine emeralds. Months passed. He gained the confidence of the gem merchants and every night sat with them around the campfire. He kept his ear cocked, never saying that he knew how to speak Greek. One night he overheard the two merchants hinting at their plans to slip away from the caravan.

Thomas and his men were waiting when the traders struck out on their own. One trader resisted and died. Philip was visibly upset at Thomas, but relented when the Crusader said the man’s death must have been God’s will because it persuaded the other merchant to lead the way.

After weeks of travel through remote and rugged country, the travelers broke through a mountain pass into a verdant land. They followed a stone-paved road, mingling with a growing number of merchants, traders and farmers. The road led to the turreted gates of a city as large as any in Europe. A magnificent palace overlooked the city from high on a hill.

The gem trader had papers from a previous visit and the city guards allowed him to pass. He quickly disappeared through the gates, grinning at the former captors as he left them behind. Philip told the guards that he had a letter for the king. The guards took the letter and threw the strangers into a dungeon. After languishing a few days, the prisoners were visited by a black-robed man.

Speaking in a strange Latin dialect, the robed man said he was the king’s minister and that he had read the Pope’s letter. He had them moved to cleaner, more spacious quarters. They were well-fed and given robes to wear. Their every need was attended to, but they were still prisoners. The men gambled. Philip passed the time keeping a journal. It was not a terrible existence, but they were overjoyed when the minister sent a message saying the king wanted to see Philip and Thomas.

Guards escorted the two men to the hill palace through streets lined with opulent mansions and bustling shops. Philip had expected a throne room filled with courtiers. Instead, he and Thomas were ushered into a small, simply furnished chamber.

A middle-aged man with close-cropped gray hair and beard sat behind a dark-wood table. Unlike the minister and the guards, whose features had a faint Asian cast, the man’s long handsome face was Caucasian. He wore no crown or opulent cloak, only a plain robe that differed from the others in its color, an imperial purple.

In a regal voice that was compelling, in spite of its softness, he told his guests to sit, and apologized for not seeing them sooner.

“I was away to another part of my great kingdom,” he said. He placed his hand on the letter from Alexander, which lay on the table, the papal seal broken, and gazed at Philip with deep-set eyes the color of amber. “Tell me about your Pope and your long journey.”

Philip related how Alexander had recruited his physician to carry the message to Prester John. The king listened intently, nodding occasionally. Only when Philip had finished his story did the king ask probing questions about European politics and religion. At the end of the interrogation, he snapped his fingers and the minister handed Philip a vellum scroll sealed in wax.

“I would like you to carry this letter to your Pope. Your journey was arduous, and I regret having to ask that you repeat it so soon,” the king said. “You will have two days to rest and another three to prepare.”

Philip’s eyes went to the steel-bound ebony chest around three feet long that sat on a side table. The minister lifted the black box in two hands, set it in front of the king and removed the lid.

Thomas muttered a prayer, and Philip didn’t blame the astonished knight. They were gazing at a golden scepter, made in the shape of a long cross and encrusted with emeralds.

“It’s beautiful,” Philip whispered.

A quick smile came to the king’s lips. “Yes, it is beautiful, but it is more than that. It is the symbol of my power. I entrust you to carry this gift to your Pope along with other tokens of my esteem to reassure him that I will soon lead my armies to be by his side in the fight against the infidels. I wish you a safe journey and Godspeed.”

He rose from the table and disappeared through a curtained door. The minister gently lowered the lid. The audience was over.

Five days later Philip and his men left the kingdom of Prester John and headed west. They were accompanied by fifty fierce-eyed horse archers clad in black-robes over light breast armor made of segmented steel plates. Steel skull caps protected their heads. They carried curved swords, but their main weapon was a short bow made of wood and horn, fashioned with the tips curved forward to exact the maximum power from the bronze-tipped arrows launched from the animal sinew strings.

The archers guarded a column of twenty mules harnessed together in pairs and several mule-drawn wooden supply carts. Each pair of mules carried an ebony chest in a hammock slung between their broad backs. The chest holding the scepter rode by itself in a mule cart positioned in the middle of the column. The horse archers called themselves the Guardians. Their sworn duty was to defend the contents of the boxes with their lives.

The iron-handed captain of the Guardians made sure the tightly-spaced column moved at double the average caravan travel speed of eight miles a day regardless of weather or physical barriers.

Philip and Thomas rode side-by-side at the head of the procession. The Italian’s olive complexion had been darkened to near mahogany by years of exposure to harsh sunlight. He rode a fine-limbed chestnut Arabian horse. Like the archers, he wore a breast plate and skull cap. Thomas towered above him, sitting astride a giant Percheron of dappled gray.

As the horses jogged along, Philip looked off at the scorched hills and jagged, snow-peaked mountains. He swept his arm in the air.

“You know me to be a man of great piety, Thomas. But If God is all-powerful, why did He not bring beauty to every part of the world?”

The doctor’s philosophical meanderings had become a familiar refrain against the clop of hooves over thousands of miles traveled together.

“Perhaps He is testing us,” Thomas said.

“Well put, Thomas. Worthy of the most learned theologian. And what a test is in store for us! Just look at this awful place. It is difficult to imagine that God is behind every stone.”

The Crusader was looking at the wrinkled landscape, but with the steely gaze of a military man who saw potential danger rather than the Almighty lurking behind the massive boulders and in the deep ravines. They were traveling along a path that led down into a narrowing valley hemmed in by hills that grew steeper and closer together. A ragged carpet of waist-high bushes and trees with twisted trunks covered the boulder-strewn slopes. Their guide had insisted that the canyon was the quickest way through the mountains.

Thomas saw that it was also a perfect place for an ambush. The caravan could turn back, but the search for another way through the mountains would delay their journey to Rome, and their pack animals needed the water that the guide promised they would have further into the valley.

Thomas had begrudgingly hired the guide at the last caravan stop because he spoke English he had learned from passing travelers. He said he had led many caravans. Thomas didn’t trust him. He had kept a close eye on the man who was riding ahead of the caravan with a knight at his side. He watched as the guide dropped back a few paces from the knight, removed his turban and used it to wipe the sweat off his face.

As if released from a magician’s hat, a flock of silver-feathered birds erupted near a clump of trees about half-way up the slope to the right. Philip watched the birds whirl into the sky, then glanced back and saw a quick on-off firefly glint in the trees.

A cut-off force was in hiding. Another force was likely hidden on the opposite side of the canyon; both were positioned to stop a retreat once the column was ambushed.

The release of the caged birds would signal the main force that the caravan was entering the trap. Thomas smiled. If he had been leading the ambush he would have made sure every shiny metal weapon that could catch sunlight had been sheathed away from the sun’s rays. The lack of discipline was a good sign. The caravan would likely be facing wild bandits rather than a trained army.

Thomas raised his mail-covered fist above his head and the caravan came to a crawling halt at the signal. He leaned over in his saddle and said:

“Master Philip, if you would be so kind as to convey a message to the captain?”

The doctor was the official leader of the caravan, but he deferred to the battle-scarred ex-Crusader in all matters of security. He asked no questions and quickly relayed the message to the captain who rode back along the column to convey the orders to the Guardians.

Two archers slid from their saddles. One went over to a mule-drawn cart that carried a clay pot in a bed of sand and removed the pot cover. Heat blasted from the glowing red embers that allowed fire to be moved from camp to camp. From another cart, the second man removed a wooden bucket that held pieces of smoked meat preserved in melted fat. He carried the bucket along the lines and the archers each plunged arrows into the thick goo.

His comrade fashioned a torch from pieces of kindling and held it close to the embers until it caught fire. He followed the bucket and touched the torch to the fat-soaked arrows. As each arrow flared into flames, the Guardian holding it peeled away from the main column.

The guide galloped back to Thomas.

“Why have we stopped?” the man demanded.

Ignoring the question, Thomas said, “How much did they pay you to betray us?”

Fear flickered in the guide’s dark eyes. He snapped the reins and jerked the animal’s head aside, digging his heels into the mule’s flanks. The move ignited the animal’s reflexes. It lurched forward and broke into a fast trot.

Thomas’ horse reared up on its powerful hind legs and sprang forward with an unexpected agility, covering the ground with long thundering strides. As Thomas caught up with the mule and its rider, he drew his broadsword from its chest scabbard in an exquisitely timed motion and brought it around in a sweeping arc.

The razor edge of the German-forged blade caught the guide’s neck at the base of the skull. The head separated from the shoulders and hit the ground like a ripe melon.

As Thomas galloped back to the caravan, the two lines of Guardians positioned at the base of the hills on both sides of the canyon began to shoot flaming arrows into the air. Each arrow that disappeared into the tree-tops planted a fiery seed. Smoke blossomed where fire had taken hold. Tendrils of flame merged and spread, quickly turning the hillsides into infernos.

Movement rippled down the hillsides ahead of the advancing flames. The men who had been hiding in the brush were running for their lives. The moving wall of fire enveloped some men, but others made it safely to the valley floor where they brandished swords and spears and charged the horse archers in a shrieking mob. The bowmen easily picked off the attackers. Within minutes the valley was littered with bodies.

The fast-moving fire rapidly burned off the vegetation. As the rainfall of gray ash diminished and the haze thinned, the valley revealed itself to be honey-combed with openings. Men streamed from the caves and swarmed down the glowing hillsides. Shouts of anger and blood lust echoed throughout the smoke-filled valley.

The Guardians coolly adjusted their tactics for rapid fire. Each horse archer clutched a handful of arrows in his hand and drew the bow string back to his cheek instead of the ear. Killing clouds of feathered shafts descended on the attackers.

For every bandit who fell, the caves disgorged three more to take his place. Some bandits were armed with bows. While their aim was poor, the deadly cloud of arrows began to tell against the lightly armored horse archers. Several Guardians were killed outright. The others walked their horses backwards, trying to hold formation while they kept up a steady rate of fire.

Thomas saw the horse archers fade back and rallied his men, who had been guarding the panicked pack animals. The Crusader way to deal with an attack was to attack.

Three knights galloped off to one side of the canyon. Thomas led another trio in tight formation toward the bandits on the opposite side.

In its day, nothing devised for warfare could rival a Crusader charge in sheer shock power. A mounted knight was the medieval equivalent of a modern battle tank. The Percheron weighed at least two thousand pounds even without armor. The Destriers the other knights rode were nearly as big.

The horses mowed down the first rank of attackers, drove deep into the living sea, spun around and headed back, leaving splintered bones and bloody pulp in their wake. They broke into the clear, then spun around and charged again. The bandits were better prepared for the second attack. A deft spear thrust unseated the man to Thomas’ left and the bandits butchered the body as the horse dragged it along.

Thomas and his men took advantage of the diversion and hacked their way into the open. The tide of battle was turning. The bandits had outflanked the archers and others were closing in on the pack animals. Philip was courageously using his short sword against three spear-carrying men on foot. Thomas rode to his aid. He cut two of the bandits practically in half and his horse trampled the third. It was too late.

A spear point had slipped through the edge of Philip’s breast plate under his raised armpit. The sword dropped from his fingers and he leaned weakly on his horse’s neck.

The Guardian captain fought his way over.

“Take the pack animals!” he shouted. “We’ll hold the bandits off as long as we can.”

Thomas grabbed the reins of Philip’s horse and ordered his men to round up the pack animals carrying the black chests.

Horse archers formed ragged defensive lines to protect their retreat.

In a clatter of hooves and wagon wheels, the knights galloped further into the narrowing valley to a bend flanked by high cliffs that soared up on either side like the walls of a great cathedral. The natural stone gates had acted as fire-breaks, keeping the blaze away from the smaller section of the ravine.

Thomas hoped the archers might hold their lines until he and his men could exit the other end. His plans were dashed against a sheer vertical wall of shale hundreds of feet high. They were in a box canyon. Below the wall was a pond surrounded by reeds. The guide had been telling the truth when he said there was water.

While the men and animals refreshed themselves at the water hole, Thomas rode up one side of the canyon, then dismounted and climbed the last few hundred feet to the top. He saw a hill that reminded him of a camel’s hump. His horsemen might be able to follow in his steps, but not the pack animals and carts.

On his descent he discovered an opening partially hidden by brush. He explored the cave entrance and saw that it was reinforced with timbers. A dozen paces past the entrance the cave widened dramatically. There would be plenty of room for men and animals.

He signaled his men to climb to him, and led them into the cave. Thomas lifted Philip from his horse and laid his friend out on the hard floor. He removed the doctor’s armor and using the basic first aid he had learned on countless battlefields, he fashioned a compress with Philip’s shirt to slow the bleeding. The lessons on how to treat wounds also made him a good judge of their severity.

Philip was dying.

Thomas removed his helmet to reveal thinning reddish gray hair. He was weary, but he kept his voice strong and reassuring.

“It’s only a scratch, Master Philip. We’ll be on our way after a short rest.”

Philip managed a slight smile. “I’ve come as far as I can. You must travel the rest of the way without me. Where is the journal I’ve been keeping?”

Thomas held up the blood-soaked leather bag that contained Philip’s daily writings.

An expression of relief came to the face of the dying man. “You must keep it safe, Thomas.”

“And what of the letter to the Pope?”

A faint smile came to Philip’s cracked lips. “I delivered one letter. It is up to you to deliver the reply.”

The smile hardened into a grimace. Philip tensed his body and his eyes rolled up in his head. A guttural sound escaped from his throat. Thomas felt a leaden heaviness in his chest. For the first time in many years he was feeling an unusual emotion. Sadness.

Someone called his name. The scout had returned to the cave with a breathless report. “I saw no sign of the Guardians, but the bandits are not attacking.”

“They know we have no place to go,” Thomas said. “They will tend to their dead and rob the Guardians. Then they will rest and attack at dawn.”

“We’ll stand and fight to the end,” the look-out said.

The other men echoed his determination with shouts of defiance.

“No. We will carry the fight to them,” Thomas said. “But first we have some work to do.”

Thomas fashioned a torch and walked further into the cave. He saw that it had been used as a tomb. Bones lay in an elevated wall niche at the end of the tomb. Clay wine vessels had been placed at the feet of the skeleton in the alcove.

While his men unloaded the chests and stacked them, Thomas swept aside the occupant of the niche. He placed Philip’s body in the opening, covered his friend with his armor and bloody robe. He slipped the helmet onto Philip’s head. He mumbled a soldier’s prayer and made the sign of the cross.

After a moment of thought, he removed the plug from of the wine vessels. The contents had evaporated and the top was encrusted with dry resin. He placed Philip’s journal in the vessel, then use his torch to melt the resin into an airtight seal when he pushed the plug back into the opening.

His men had finished unloading the chests. He unlatched the lids and allowed his men to examine the contents. They gasped when they saw the fabulous wealth in gold and jewels, but they went silent when Thomas lifted the scepter from its container.

He placed the scepter on Philip’s body and the gold cross on his forehead. He took two gold coins from a chest and placed them on his friend’s eyes to buy his way into heaven.

Next, he extracted the Prester John scroll from its leather bag. He dipped his finger in Philip’s wound and used his friend’s blood to draw a diagram on the back of the vellum. As soon as it had dried, he placed the letter back in the pouch and hung it around his neck.

After darkness had fallen, he ordered his men to move all the animals out of the cave. Ropes were tied from four mules to the vertical mine timbers at the entrance. From a safe distance, the mules pulled the timbers out and the entrance collapsed on itself. A massive boulder tumbled from above the cave, sealing the opening.

They made their way to the natural buttresses at the narrowest part of the canyon. Figures were moving around the fires that blocked the only way out. Thomas ordered the men to cut the animals loose and herd them ahead. A balky mule brayed in protest. There were shouts of alarm; their attack had been detected.

Thomas slapped the mule on its haunches with the broad side of his sword. Braying even louder than before, the mule galloped toward the fires. The other animals followed, crashing through the bandit encampment as their hooves kicked up showers of sparks.

Thomas and his men charged in behind the mules, forming a flying wedge with the giant Percheron at the point of the tight formation. Thomas swung his sword as if it were a scythe, feeling its blade bite into flesh and bone until he realized he was hacking away at empty air.

He brought his horse to a halt and looked behind him.

The camp fires were far behind him. His companions were nowhere to be seen.

He was all alone.

He touched the pouch around his neck to see if it was still there, and then urged his horse on into the looming darkness.

The Persian scout could have been forgiven for assuming that the figure in the dust vortex was a monster.

The metallic head was actually a pot-shaped steel helmet and the scales were a cloak of chain mail. The man’s white tunic looked like lacework. His coif, or mailed hood was draped around his neck, further enhancing the reptilian appearance. A ferocious reddish beard caked with sand and dust hid the lower part of the face. Shredded blisters covered the unprotected part of his sun-blasted face and the threads of dead skin gave the man’s skin a fur-like shagginess. His cloudy blue eyes were set in a vacant stare.

The man stirred and brought his right arm toward his heaving chest. The hand groped under the chain mail coat and came out with a leather pouch that hung from a broken cord. The sergeant had assumed that the man was completely blind. But when the Persian reached for the pouch a hand as big as a lion’s paw whipped out and grabbed his wrist with unexpected strength.

The sergeant’s companions raised their swords to strike.

“Wait!” the sergeant commanded.

The swords were slowly lowered.

With his free hand, the sergeant tilted the water bag into the man’s mouth. A few drops made it past the parched lips and the water seemed to revive the man. His fingers uncurled from the sergeant’s wrist.

“Who are you?” the guard said. He knew fragments of several languages and repeated the question until he got a response using Latin.

The cracked lips twitched, and laboriously formed a word.

“Tho-mas,” the man whispered. “My name is Thomas.”

The hollow voice seemed to issue from the grave.

The mouth produced a string of words that made no sense, as if spoken in a delirium. Then the spittle-covered lips froze in place and the words deteriorated into a mumble. The man’s eyes widened in a wild glassy stare. His massive chest heaved spasmodically a few times and went still.

The sergeant removed the pouch from the dead fingers, opened the bag and pulled out a vellum scroll covered with writing and rolled around a wooden spindle.

The helmet and the mail coat were too worn and damaged to be of value. He might sell the vellum to one of the gullible pilgrims in the caravan. He was sure he could convince someone it was a holy relic. The sergeant tucked the scroll back into the pouch, tied the broken cord and looped it around his neck.

He ordered the men to bury the dead body while he rode back to get the caravan moving again. The grumbling guards used their sword points to scrape out a shallow grave and shoved the body into the hole with their feet. The reluctant grave-diggers returned to their place at the head of the caravan.

The hissing sands of the desert began to complete their unfinished task. Within minutes, a grainy shroud covered the huge body. And long before the jingling of harness bells and the shouts of camel drivers faded into the distance the desert had wrapped the man called Thomas in its timeless embrace.

Georgi Vasilyev was seated on a camp stool in his tent, peering through a magnifying glass at the rock specimens spread out on the table in front of him, when he heard an excited voice calling out his name. Seconds later, his Afghan assistant Raheem threw the flap aside and stuck his head into the tent.

“Dr. Vasilyev. Come quick!”

The middle-aged geologist from the Soviet geological survey mission and his younger counterpart from the Afghan ministry of mining had become close friends, but Vasilyev had specifically requested that he be left undisturbed to catalogue his collection.

Before answering he picked up another specimen and jotted a note into a pad. “What is it?” he growled.

“Sorry, Dr. Vasilyev. I know you wanted no interruptions, but we made a strange find. Come. You won’t be sorry.”

The Russian suppressed a smile at his assistant’s unabashed enthusiasm. He sighed heavily for show, followed Raheem outside and got into the passenger seat of the UAZ-469 parked next to the tent. The rugged all-terrain vehicle was the Russian equivalent of the American Jeep. Raheem drove at subsonic speed and they soon came to a large lake.

Raheem slammed on the brakes and the UAZ fish-tailed to a skidding stop alongside a BTR-152 armored personnel carrier parked a few hundred feet from the cliffs. The vehicle was used to transport the twelve-man squadron assigned to protect the survey party.

The guards stood in a rough circle with their AK-47s slung on their shoulders, alongside a group of Russian and Afghan surveyors, around the perimeter of a pit approximately fifteen feet across and a yard deep. Two Afghan laborers who’d been hired by the survey stood in the shallow crater leaning on the handles of their shovels. The hard sunlight glinted on a flat, diamond-shaped object a couple of feet long.

“What is this?” Vasilyev asked Raheem.

“Not sure. One of the men discovered it a while ago. The wind blew away the sand.”

Vasilyev didn’t have to be reminded of the wind blowing off the lake. The sharp-edged breeze stabbed at his ribs and penetrated the mushroom-shaped woolen hat to his bald scalp. Vasilyev scrambled down into the pit. He was in his 60s, but ten years of field work in the harsh environment of Afghanistan had toughened him. He had shed many pounds tromping around the rugged countryside and hardly ever drank the vodka that many of his countrymen sucked down like water.

He borrowed a shovel from one of the laborers and dug around the object. Then he got down on his knees to examine what appeared to be a large winch. The name etched into the metal revealed that the winch had been manufactured in Colorado. Coiled around the winch drum were the frayed remnants of a cable. Next to the winch were some old gray wooden beams. Eye bolts had been screwed into the wood.

Vasilyev got to his feet and signaled the Afghans to widen the excavation.

There was a hollow tung sound as one Afghan sank his shovel blade into the earth. A minute later, he had uncovered a round metal object. Vasilyev squatted and ran his fingers over the shiny brass surface and around the glass vision ports. He furrowed his brow. A diving helmet was the last thing he expected to find in the desert.

He glanced off at the glittering waters of the lake trying to picture a diver descending into the depths from a boat. Why the heavy-duty winch? He had worked on mine projects and had seen similar pulleys suspended over the earth. On impulse, he stood and began to walk back and forth, moving closer to the lake with each pacing turn.

He had developed a sharp eye for detail as a geologist. After a few passes he saw a dark line in the ground. He brushed the sand away with his hand and called the laborers over. Within seconds they had uncovered a metal plate around four feet square. They removed the plate and Vasilyev looked down into a dark shaft.

One of his Russian colleagues said, “I wonder where this goes.”

“Let’s take a look,” Vasilyev said. He ordered Raheem to round up some rope and electric torches.

As the Afghan went to carry out the request, Vasilyev heard the sound of an aircraft engine. A black dot appeared in the clear blue sky, growing in size until it morphed into the transport helicopter that brought supplies in every week. It was three days early.

The chopper landed near the troop carrier, sending up clouds of dust. A man in an army sergeant’s uniform stepped out. He engaged the squad leader in conversation, then both men came over to Vasilyev.

“We have to return to Kabul,” the squad leader said.

“When?”

“Now”

“I can’t go now,” Vasilyev said with a glance at the open shaft. “We have survey work to do.”

The sergeant spoke, his voice tinged with weariness. “The survey is over. The Soviet army is leaving the country. All civilians are being evacuated.”

As survey leader, the well-being of his fellow scientists was Vasilyev’s responsibility. He ordered his men to cover over the shaft opening, then told the Russian and Afghan geologists to return to the base camp and gather up their belongings. He paid off the laborers and said they could keep any equipment the survey left behind.

With all the scientists aboard, the helicopter rose into the air and hovered over the abandoned jeep and troop carrier. The Afghan laborers waved at the departing chopper as it gained altitude and flew over a steeply rounded hill that rose from the generally flat terrain bordering the lake.

Kabul had been at the eye of the storm as fighting between the Soviets and Afghans raged around it. But now rockets were hitting the city on a daily basis. An army truck was waiting on the tarmac when the helicopter landed. A representative from the Soviet embassy stood next to the truck with a handful of diplomatic personnel.

He greeted Vasilyev and the other Russian geologists and handed them each a packet of papers, saying, “These are your tickets home. This is my last official job.”

“I have to go back into the city to get my files,” Vasilyev said.

“Impossible.” The man pointed to a giant Ilyushin jetliner. “This will be your last chance to leave Kabul on a normal flight. Thirty thousand insurgents are massed around the city. Our troops are leaving the country. Kabul will soon fall. You don’t want to be here when the mujahideen take over.”

Vasilyev thought about the metal cabinets lining the walls of his office at the ministry. The files stuffed into the drawers bulged with maps, charts and detailed reports gathered over ten years of field expeditions to every part of the country. He turned to Raheem.

“You and the other ministry geologists must gather together the files in my cabinets and hide them. You can’t let the insurgents get their hands on this material. Do you understand?”

“I’ll tend to it as soon as you’re safely off.”

Vasilyev gave his colleague a rib-cracking Russian hug. He had sent his wife and children home weeks before his last field trip and had vacated his apartment as soon as the Soviet Union signed an accord agreeing to leave the country. The embassy staffers had climbed into the truck and were yelling at him to hurry up.

He said his sad good-byes to the Afghan geologists he’d worked with since his arrival in 1968 and climbed into the back of the truck which joined a line of vehicles pulling up to the plane to discharge refugees. The refugees loaded their own luggage in the baggage compartment and hustled up the gangway.

Chaos reigned inside the cabin. Panicked passengers claimed their unreserved seats against a backdrop of arguments and crying children. The passengers had been dressed for the cold weather and the overheated cabin reeked of perspiration and unwashed bodies.

Georgi found an empty row at the rear of the cabin, next to the bathroom, which smelled as if it hadn’t been emptied in between flights. A heavy-set man squeezed in next to him. Georgi was on the portly side, but the man overflowed the arm rests and the geologist had to lean toward the bulkhead.

The man had been a bureaucrat in a government-run building company. He talked non-stop until he was cut off by the applause greeting the announcement that the plane was ready to take off. The jetliner taxied down the runway and rose at a steep angle that would gain it altitude out of gun range as quickly as possible.

Vasilyev stared morosely at the magnificent snow-capped mountains that ringed the city. He would miss Afghanistan. The country was a geologist’s playground. Sitting astride massive tectonic plates, the country had some of the most complex geology in the world. He looked at the rugged terrain the same way some men might take in the curves of a beautiful woman.

“Tovarich.”

His seat companion waved a bottle of cheap vodka under Georgi’s nose.

“No thank you,” the geologist said.

The man jiggled the bottle. “You must drink to our comrades who have died.”

Thousands of young Russians had been killed in the nine years since the Soviet Union invaded the country. Georgi took a swig of the vile concoction and handed the bottle back. When he looked out the window he saw only clouds.

He prayed that Raheem would heed his advice. Even after trekking from one end of the country to the other, there was much he didn’t know about the ancient land. But there was one thing that he was absolutely certain of. If the material in his filing cabinets got into the wrong hands, there would be many more toasts to countless dead who were yet to be born.

Cait Everson was running for her life.

As she raced down the center of a quiet street, the only sounds she could hear in the sleeping suburban neighborhood were the pad-pad of her bare feet on the tarmac, the quick intake and exhalation of her breath and the menacing scuffle of footsteps from behind.

She didn’t know who her pursuers were, but her instincts told her that the men trying to catch her were no mere rapists or muggers. It went beyond their freakish appearance, the platinum hair and icy blue eyes. It was the sheer, predatory relentlessness she’d detected in their identical faces since the twin men had started stalking her weeks before.

The alarms clanged in her brain, urging her to greater speed, warning that if they caught Cait she would be as good as dead.

She gulped energizing mouthfuls of air into her lungs and put all her strength into her long-legged strides.

Only minutes before she had driven her five-year-old Honda Accord from Georgetown University across the Potomac River on the Francis Scott Key Bridge to Arlington, Virginia where she lived in a neat two-bedroom condo. Traffic had tapered off as she left the city, and as she stopped at a red light in a quiet residential neighborhood near her condo, hers was the only car around.

Headlights suddenly flared in her rear-view mirror.

Whump!

A big vehicle had slammed into the Accord’s rear bumper. Her head snapped forward. The impact failed to activate the car’s air bags, but it triggered a string of colorful oaths more suited to a sailor than a college history professor.

Cait got out of her car and strode back to inspect the damage. The bumper was a crumpled mess. She stepped out of the glare of headlights from the offending Cadillac SUV and shielded her eyes. In the reflected light, she saw the driver’s blue eyes and white hair. And sitting in the passenger seat was a man with identical features.

She dashed back to her car and went to open the door. The SUV driver snapped the transmission into gear and hit the gas pedal. The door handle was ripped from her hand as the impact propelled the Honda forward several yards. The SUV’s doors opened. The identical twins stepped out and walked toward her.

There was only one thing she could do.

Run.

She kicked off her low-heeled leather work shoes and sprinted along the street. Two pairs of rapid footsteps pounded the pavement behind her. Cait was in good shape — she ran five miles every day — and she slowly outdistanced her pursuers. The footsteps faded. A moment later she heard car doors slam shut and the squeal of tires from the accelerating vehicle as it took off after her.

The SUV would catch up within seconds. She ran down a dark street. The SUV followed. She could feel the headlights burning into her back. Cait changed course like a jack-rabbit being chased by a coyote and ran across the manicured front lawn of a ranch style house. The SUV drove onto the lawn. She ran around behind the house to the back yard and skirted a swimming pool. The Cadillac followed and almost drove into the pool before the driver hit the brakes and threw the SUV into reverse.

She crossed into another yard and then onto a parallel street. The SUV’s engine growled in the distance, and she heard the screech of its protesting tires as it navigated a tight corner. Cait ran up to a house, punched the doorbell, and plastered herself against the wall.

The SUV sped past, braked, backed up, stopped, and accelerated. The commotion had attracted attention. Lights were starting to come on in the row houses along the street and figures could be seen in the windows. The vehicle kept moving until the sound of its engine faded.

Cait fumbled her cell phone out of her jacket and called the number the campus police officer had given her earlier that day. A sleepy female voice answered at the other end of the line.

“Douglas. Who’s calling?”

“It’s Dr. Everson. I talked to you this morning.”

“I remember, Dr. Everson.” The voice was more alert. “What’s going on?”

Cait breathlessly relayed what had just happened.

“Two men are after me. The ones I told you about.”

“Can you help me?”

“That’s out of our jurisdiction,” the officer said. “I’ll call the Metro police and they’ll get in touch with the Arlington cops. Where should they meet you?”

Cait told the officer she would wait in an all-night coffee shop nearby.

An Arlington police cruiser pulled up in front of the coffee shop ten minutes later and drove her back to her car. She was relieved to see her lap-top case still on the front seat. She told the police what had happened. They drove her to her condo and at the request of the university police, a cruiser was stationed in front.

She locked her door and mixed herself a stiff Cosmopolitan. Her hands shook, but a few sips of the drink calmed her down. Those men were the same ones who had been following her for days. Why? And who were they?

The matter had been preying on her mind. Earlier that day, a student had to repeat her name a second time to get her attention.

Cait had snapped out of the trance she’d slipped into as she’d been teaching her favorite class, an introductory course on overland and maritime silk routes. Cait hid her embarrassment with a smile. An associate professor with a doctorate degree in Central Asian history was not supposed to daydream on the job.

“Sorry. I must have zoned out. Could you repeat your question?”

The female student lowered her upraised hand. “I asked about the Tarim mummies.”

“Yes. Fascinating stuff. The mummies were non-Mongoloid, apparently Caucasoid, found more than a hundred miles east of Yingpan, China. They’ve been dated back to 1600 B.C. Long before Alexander the Great really opened up the Silk Road. No one knows where they came from.”

The student had a follow-up. “Do you think the presence of a Caucasoid in China in any way vindicates the theory that east-west contacts go back much earlier than historians are willing to admit?”

“It’s an intriguing theory, but not conclusive without additional evidence. I will say that the mummies are indicative of the fact that globalization is hardly a new concept. Any more questions?”

More hands shot into the air. The class was made up of enthusiastic students in fields that included diplomacy, economics, journalism, politics and the arts. Cait had earned a reputation for bringing a contemporary global perspective to ancient events. The discussion continued until the class ended. She shooed the students from the room, gathered her papers and left the history department building, heading south through the sprawling campus until she came to Village C, the six-story brick building that housed the Georgetown University Department of Public Safety.

She took a deep breath and strode toward the entrance with purpose in her step, thinking that the worst that could happen would be that the police would think she was crazy.

Her instincts proved correct a few minutes later as she sat at a table in Room 116 across from a uniformed campus police officer who said her name was Douglas. The officer had asked what the problem was. Cait had flippantly replied that she felt as if she were in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Officer Douglas didn’t laugh. She raised an eyebrow and read from a questionnaire.

“Have you seen a suspicious individual in your neighborhood entering an apartment, room or home?”

“Describe suspicious individual,” Cait said.

“Individuals who like to seem to be lurking,” the officer said, after some thought.

“Oh,” Cait said. “Well then. No lurkers.”

“Have you ever seen a suspicious individual entering an office without apparent purpose, or loitering in a parking lot or trying to force open a car door?”

“No, no, and no.”

“Or possessing two bikes or bike parts?”

Cait emitted a strange sound that combined a laugh and a cry of disbelief.

“This is not about bicycles,” she said with an edge to her voice.

The officer folded her hands in front of her. “What is it about, Professor Everson?”

“As I just explained, I think someone has been following me.”

“Someone you can’t identify.”

“Correct. As I said, I’ll be in a public place and I’ll look up and see a man staring at me. When I stare back he averts his eyes. Or goes back to reading his newspaper. I know this sounds insane, but one minute he is there. The next he’s not.”

“He disappears into thin air?”

Cait frowned. “Please don’t go there, Officer Douglas. Of course he doesn’t vanish. He simply gets up and leaves when my attention is diverted.”

“Would you go over that description again?”

The officer was looking for discrepancies in her story. It was a classic case of Town and Gown, the tension that often existed between local worker bees and the academics in their ivory towers. She described the man again.

“He has platinum white hair, cut short, but I think it’s premature, because his face is younger. Almost boyish. High cheekbones and intense blue eyes. Mouth always seems to be in a half smile.”

“Those are pretty good observations.”

“I’m a scientist, trained to observe.” She paused. “There’s something else. Sometimes there are two of them. Twins, apparently.”

“Twins?”

“Identical. I’m not seeing double. I have perfect eye-sight.”

“That’s a new one.” Officer Douglas pursed her lips in thought. “From your description, he-I mean, they, sound handsome.”

“I suppose so, in a sick stalker sort of way.”

The officer leaned forward onto the table.

“I could not say this if I were a male officer. But men might stare at you simply because you are an attractive young woman.”

At thirty-six, Cait was old enough to know that men found her physically attractive. She was aware, too, that a good-looking woman who had advanced to her level in academia would always be subject to envious whisperings. During her work hours, however, she tried her best to keep a low profile — she had her long hair up, wore functional glasses, hid her figure with practical but unflattering clothing, and used a minimal amount of make-up.

Some attributes were impossible to minimize. She was tall and willowy, with slightly more bust than she preferred. Her eyes were the color of a gentian flower and framed with long lashes. She had white, even teeth and a flashing smile. Had she been true to her California girl roots, her raven hair would have been dyed the color of honey, and her creamy white skin burnished with a surf bum tan. Still, even without those trappings, Cait could walk into a roomful of beautiful blondes and draw every eye in the house.

Cait dismissed the officer’s suggestion. “Are you advising me to make myself less attractive?”

The officer frowned.

“Let’s try another avenue. You said this attention started a month ago. Was there anything going on in your life, any change in a relationship or something that happened at work about then?”

“No,” Cait said with a shake of her head. “Nothing like that.”

Cait hoped the officer didn’t hear the tic in her answer. She was well aware, though, that the surveillance began after she had sent the letter to the State Department. The officer droned on with more inane questions. Finally she sat back in her chair and pinched her chin.

“This is a tough one, Dr. Everson. I have a daughter, so I’m sympathetic. But there isn’t a lot I can do at this point. No crime has been committed. There’s no evidence that one will be committed. All you have is a feeling these guys are looking at you. I need more than that to go on.”

Cait kept her anger in check and said she understood the dilemma. She agreed to keep a journal detailing time, place and nature of the stalking incidents. The officer gave Cait her cell phone number to call if she had further questions. After she left, Cait cursed her naiveté for assuming the police would help her. She walked across campus and was glad to get back to the sanctuary of her office. As she sat at her desk going over the fruitless meeting in her mind, a knock at the door almost sent her tumbling out her chair.

The door opened a second later and a face peered in.

“Are you busy?”

“Never too busy to chat with you, Professor Saleem. Have a seat.”

The man who stepped into her office and took a chair was in his mid-fifties. He wore a misshapen autumn brown corduroy jacket, relaxed fit jeans, a blue button-down shirt, and mismatched yellow tie. Dark eyes peered out from behind owlish round plastic eyeglasses that enhanced his academic look.

The history department sought out non-American faculty to provide depth and global perspective, and in keeping with such policy, Professor Saleem was on loan from a Pakistani university. He and Cait exchanged some campus gossip, but at one point he removed his glasses and leaned forward in his chair.

“I’m curious, Dr. Everson. Has the State Department replied to your letter?”

“Not a word,” Cait said with a shrug of her shoulders. “I guess they’re too busy to pay attention to a lowly history professor.”

He pondered her answer. “Do you think it would have helped if you were more specific with the location of your discovery?”

“I’m not sure it would have made a difference.”

“Perhaps not, but it would give you credibility. Unless you think you’re wrong.”

“Not at all. I’m so close I can taste it. I just need a little more time.”

“I’ve got good cartographical background. I may be of help.”

“Thanks, Professor. But I want to be sure. In the meantime I’d prefer to keep my theories to myself so as not to attract enemy fire.”

“I understand. Good luck then.” The professor rose from his chair. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

“You can help in one way.” She tapped the folder on her desk. “I’ll be working late tonight on some written exams. Would you let the security guard know I’m here?”

The professor said he would be glad to. After he left, Cait began to read. She was near the bottom of the pile when she heard a knock on the door.

A voice said, “Security. You okay in there, Professor?”

Cait glanced at the wall clock. It was past eleven-thirty. “I’m about done. Would you walk me to my car in about five minutes?”

“I’ll check the rest of the floor and come back for you.”

Cait was about to shut down the computer, but she had another thought. She called up a file that contained a number of satellite photos. She went over the photos, zooming in on an image that showed a lake shaped like a figure eight. Using a crayon from her tool bar, she drew a circle at the edge of the lake.

She sent the file as an email to the State Department and a copy to Professor Saleem with a quick note:

“Taking you up on your offer to help. Let’s talk about this.”

Minutes later, the guard escorted her to the parking lot where she had left her Honda. And less than a half an hour later she was pounding breathlessly along an Arlington street in fear for her life.

Now, as she sat in the safety of her apartment, she still felt terribly vulnerable. Gradually, though, she grew angry at the unwanted violation of her life by a couple of freaks. Her fear changed to determination. She tossed down the rest of her Cosmo and placed a phone call.

A male voice answered. “Yes?”

“I need your help,” she said. “Someone is after me and I want a place to hide.”

“It is always a pleasure to see you, but it’s a long way and it could be dangerous,” the voice said, speaking English with a slight accent.

“It’s safer there than here,” she said.

“When?”

“Now.”

“I’ll make arrangements.”

Fifteen minutes later the phone rang and the voice said, “Fly to Zurich and my friends will take care of you.” He gave her a name and number, which she jotted down.

She thanked him and hung up. Then she sent an email to the university saying she was taking a leave of absence to deal with a family matter. She got on her computer and found a first class seat on a Swiss Air flight leaving the next morning. She almost gagged at the cost, but it was the only space available. Next, she packed her biggest suitcase, mostly with field clothing and gear. Then she slept for a couple of hours. When her alarm clock sounded, she got up, showered, and dressed in comfortable traveling clothes.

An officer knocked on her door around eight to check on her.

She told him that she had decided to stay with friends and asked the police to stay a while longer while she called a taxi. As she walked out to the taxi with her bag she couldn’t help reflecting on the craziness of her situation. Her peaceful life had been turned topsy-turvy and she was seeking safety in one of the most dangerous places in the world.

Afghanistan.

Fifty feet below the surface, the alien intruder skimmed over the sea bottom, emitting a sinister hum and scattering silvery explosions of codfish as it burbled through the water. The box-shaped object was the color of a Yellow Cab and about the size of an old steamer trunk that had been flattened in transit, and its edges had been slightly rounded. Four stubby supports, like the legs on an overweight dachshund, extended to sled runners from the plastic housing.

Printed in black on the plastic battery housing were the words:

The vehicle stopped in front of a sliding gate that barred the way into a maze made from a framework of pipes covered in chicken wire and joined together like an old Tinker Toy. The vehicle’s camera fed the image of the gate to its computers, which sent an order to the mechanical arm at the front of the vehicle. The arm slowly unfolded, and an aluminum claw gripped the edge of the gate and pulled the barrier aside.

The vehicle swam through the opening and navigated the maze like a mouse in a lab test. Encountering a dead end, it backed out and tried another route. With each mistake, new information was added to the submersible’s data base until the vehicle popped out of the maze and headed toward a plastic storage box.

Hovering above the ocean bottom around twenty feet from the maze, Matt Hawkins watched the submersible’s antics through a video camera view-finder. He filmed the submersible as the mechanical claw removed the lid and pulled a plastic bag from the box. The vehicle pivoted slowly, stopped for a few seconds, then moved toward Hawkins and placed the bag on the sea floor. Hawkins patted the plastic housing and picked up the bag. The submersible then rose to the surface, plowed through the water a short distance, and slid into a horse-shoe shaped docking station floating on pontoons next to a white-hulled fishing boat.

Hawkins breast-stroked to the boat’s stern ladder. He handed up the bag, unclipped his weight belt and passed it and the camera to a man wearing a tan duck-billed baseball cap. He shed his SCUBA gear, climbed the ladder onto the deck, and peeled his neoprene hood off to reveal a thick mane of salt-and pepper hair and a gray-streaked beard. He stripped down to his bathing trunks and let the summer sun bake away the drops of moisture beading a muscular body that looked as if it had been carved from oak wood.

Hawkins had inherited his warm complexion, rugged profile, and lava-black eye color from his mother’s Micmac Indian forebears. His big-boned physique, with its broad shoulders and six-foot-two inch height, were gifts passed down from his English-Irish ancestors.

After stowing his dive gear in a locker, he turned to the man in the tan cap, Howard Snow — Snowy to friends — and raised his hand in a high-five. Snowy’s crinkled face had been weathered by years of exposure to sun and wind as a commercial fisherman. He removed the cold stub of the cigar clenched in his teeth.

“Congratulations, Matt,” he said, returning the high-five. “Watched the whole thing over the TV hookup. Fido behaved like a champ. Hell, he would have wagged his tail if he had one.”

“I’ll hook up a mechanical tail in time for the demo,” Hawkins said. His dark eyes twinkled with good humor. “The navy brass will get a kick out of seeing a mine detection vehicle acting like a puppy-dog. Maybe I can make him pee on an admiral’s leg.”

Snowy chortled. He knew Hawkins was capable of doing exactly what he’d suggested.

Hawkins untied the bag and pulled out a foam cooler wrapped with plastic twine, which he cut with his dive knife. Inside the box was a bottle of double-malt whiskey.

Snowy shook his head. “Heard on the docks that Fido is worth close to half a million bucks.”

The right tip of Hawkins’ mouth tweaked up in a half smirk. “Let’s just say that the navy owes me more than a bucket of clams for developing the little guy.”

“Hope the navy doesn’t mind spending that kind of dough for an underwater booze fetcher.”

“Fido is a retriever. No one will complain after they see these tests, Snowy. The artificial intelligence that allowed Fido to navigate the maze is going to make the navy and the scientists very happy. Fido can do all sorts of things, from defusing a mine to retrieving a salinity detector. And he works cheap.”

Hawkins’ answer summed up the symbiotic ties between the navy and the world-renowned Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Using funds from the navy and the resources of the institution had allowed Hawkins to design an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle that would serve both masters.

As one of Woods Hole’s leading robotic engineers, Hawkins embodied the arrangement. His SeaBot Corporation was given wide latitude that allowed him to hire Howard Snow and buy the forty-two-foot trawler Osprey for sea tests. Snowy, a wiry third-generation fisherman, had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sea, and his handyman’s skills were considerable. He had constructed the maze in his workshop. The Osprey had transported the sections to the test site over several days and they were lowered to the bottom. Hawkins dove and joined the sections together.

They winched Fido and the docking platform on board and anchored a radar buoy to warn net fishermen away from the site. Minutes later, they were cruising at twenty knots north toward Cape Cod. When they were close enough to Woods Hole to see the brick buildings that housed the institution’s labs and offices, Hawkins ducked into the cuddy cabin and changed into faded jeans, a chambray work shirt and work boots. He had radioed ahead, and the Water Street drawbridge was being raised to let the boat into Eel Pond.

They tied up at the dock and used a boom to lift the submersible and docking station onto the back of a vintage fire engine red pick-up truck. Then they pulled away from the dock, hooked the anchor line onto a mooring buoy in the pond, and used a pram to get back to shore. Snowy asked Hawkins if he wanted to celebrate the tests with a beer at the venerable Captain Kidd bar that overlooked the pond.

“Maybe later,” Hawkins said. “I want to work on my report while the stuff is still rattling around in my skull.”

“Don’t be too long. People will think that you’re unsociable.”

Hawkins was aware that his colleagues admired his unrelenting approach to work, but that he was also considered a lone wolf and eccentric even by Woods Hole standards. Hawkins was wrapped in his shell as tightly as a barnacle and the hard edge behind his easy quiet-spoken manner made some people nervous.

“Hell, I already know what they think,” Hawkins said with a shrug. “They think I’m weird.”

Snowy rolled his eyes. “Weirdness isn’t exactly in short supply in these parts.”

Snowy had a point. The tiny village at the heart of one of the world’s most prestigious centers of ocean exploration and research was loaded with brilliant oddballs.

They parted company at the dock and Hawkins got into the 1978 three-quarter ton Ford he had painstakingly restored. He turned onto Water Street, the main drag that ran along the harbor, passed the old stone Candle House that was built in the village’s whaling days, and took a right near the Georgian-style building that housed the Marine Biological Laboratory.

A few blocks back from the harbor, Hawkins turned onto a crushed shell driveway and drove into the former carriage house of a two-story mansard-roofed Victorian summer place. As he got out of the truck and walked toward the house with a slight limp, a dog ran down the porch steps and slammed into his thigh so hard that Hawkins almost lost his footing. He reached down and scratched the ears of the squirming golden retriever. The dog was a female he had adopted from the Animal Rescue League. He had called her Quisset, meaning Star of the Sea in the language of Cape Cod’s Wampanoag Indians.

With Quisset glued to his leg, Hawkins went up the porch steps and opened the unlocked door. He went into the kitchen, put the whiskey in a cabinet, and gave Quisset some dog treats, which she noisily demolished.

Hawkins climbed to the study that took up the entire second floor. Afternoon light streamed in through the picture window and reflected off the rows of polished bronze and brass diving helmets lined up in display cases according to year of manufacture. The helmets ranged from an antique Sander built in 1917 to a group of Discos dating back to the 1940s.

Hawkins had collected other examples of antique dive paraphernalia as well: a weight belt patented in 1898, dive lamps, single lens masks, air pumps, Frankenstein-type boots and double hose regulators like those used by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The wall opposite the helmets had floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books and scale models of the shipwrecks that Hawkins’ non-profit sea exploration company had discovered.

Hawkins was fascinated by the unwieldy gear both as functional art and for what it said about the earliest divers. Ever since man had crawled out of the sea humans had seemed compelled to return to their salty origins. There was no other reason a person would leave his warm, earth-bound haunts, don hundreds of pounds of encumbering equipment and descend into a hostile environment at the end of an air hose.

Hawkins flicked on a sound system. A tune by the legendary blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt — just one entry in Hawkins’ extensive collection of blues — issued from four reproduction dive helmets that housed quadraphonic speakers.

He was carrying a laptop computer that had been monitoring Fido’s video cameras. He pushed aside a dive knife made by Siebl that he used as a letter-opener, placed the computer on a sturdy desk built of polished driftwood and settled into a chair made from the welded links of a tugboat hawser.

The dog had followed him to the study and now rested her chin on his knee.

Hawkins scratched the dog’s head and thought about Snowy’s comment. He was right about Hawkins being unsociable. His real problem was his inability to trust in his fellow humans. He preferred dealing with robots. If they failed him, he could replace a part.

Maybe he should have gone to the bar. The thought made him thirsty. He said, “Beer.”

A loud hum came from a small atmospheric dive suit in a corner of the room. The suit was a scale model used to test a full-size ADS, basically an underwater vehicle with mechanical arms and legs. Hawkins had acquired the suit at auction and installed a refrigeration unit, an electric motor to give the scale model mobility and a basic audio program to pick up his commands. He had named it Mitch after the puffy-limbed Michelin man it resembled.

Mitch moved toward Hawkins on the powered roller skates attached to the bottom of its boots and stopped near his desk. Hawkins flipped back the transparent helmet and a light went on, revealing a six-pack of beer. He reached in for a bottle and said, “Thanks.”

He lowered the helmet and the refrigerator rolled back to the wall. The wonders one can accomplish with an MIT education, he mused. He stared at the three-foot-high figure.

“Maybe I am as weird as people say.”

He took a couple of slugs of beer, then booted up the computer and watched the video taken by the submersible’s camera.

Hawkins had wanted to develop a robot that would be aware of its surroundings and change its environment when it had to. Fido had not only detected the barriers blocking its way through the maze but had also figured out how to remove them. By observing, analyzing and reacting, the little robot had come one step closer to putting real artificial intelligence on the bottom of the ocean.

Hawkins was deep into the intricacies of a communications link paradigm when his phone chirped a computerized rendition of B Flat blues. The caller ID said the call was from out of the area. He pushed the speaker button and said hello.

“This is Jack Kelly. Don’t hang up on me, Matt.”

Matt recognized the knife-sharp voice even though he hadn’t heard it in years.

He smiled. “Why would I hang up on my favorite former commanding officer?”

“Nice try, Matt. I saw the letter you sent to the navy. It should have been written on asbestos.”

Hawkins recalled that the letter had used the word “incompetent” more than might have been necessary to prove his point.

“Okay, the letter was a little over the top. But I’ve mellowed, Jack. I don’t hate the navy brass 24/7. Only on damp days. If I count the twinges in my left leg I can forecast a storm right down to Beaufort scale.”

“Glad I caught you on a good day, lieutenant. Got a big favor to ask. Urgent matter. Can you come to the War College today?”

The naval war college in Newport, Rhode Island was about an hour’s drive from Woods Hole.

“What’s going on, Jack? Does the navy want to make me an admiral?”

“Haven’t a clue. I’m only the messenger.”

Hawkins glanced at his computer. “I’m in the middle of a big project, Jack.”

“Be forewarned that they intend to keep bugging you. If you say no to me, they’ll go up the line of command to the Secretary of Defense.”

“Who’s they?”

“You know better than to ask me that. Consider this a personal favor to me.”

“Like to accommodate you, commander, but my dealings with the navy are strictly arm’s-length these days. The only guys I’ll talk to are the tech people and the bean counters. Unless this has to do with my robotics work, it’s nothing that will interest me. Sorry.”

“Okay. Call this number if you want to reconsider.”

Hawkins grunted a reply, hung up and stared into space. He’d always gotten along with Kelly. Not necessarily one of the good guys, but he wasn’t bad either. But it had been five years since Hawkins had pulled a paycheck as a navy SEAL. It made no sense.

He wasn’t joking when he told Kelly that the pain in his leg predicted the approach of nasty weather. The dampness in the air that presaged rain affected the metal bolts that held his bones together. He got up and went to the window.

The sky had gone from blue to tangerine.

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.

In mariner’s lore, a reddish-orange sky in the evening was the sign of good weather. There was only one problem. Hawkins’ leg was twanging like a bluesman plucking a guitar string, and in his experience, the sensation meant only one thing.

A storm was on its way.

Hawkins got the bad news over coffee early the next morning.

It came in the form of an email on his smart phone saying that his navy contract to develop Fido had been canceled because of lack of funding. After a flurry of back-and-forth emails that shed no further light on the decision, he made a series of dead-end phone calls. Everyone in the navy department was apparently out in the field.

He finally got through to an engineer he’d worked with on an earlier project and asked what happened. The engineer said he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“What I’m talking about is cutting me loose after I’ve put a pile of my own money into this project in expectations that it would be repaid.”

The engineer said he would ask around. He called back a half hour later and confirmed the cancellation and said no one could come up with an explanation. Hawkins was stewing over the announcement when Snowy called and said the Osprey had sunk at its mooring. Minutes later, he was standing on the dock with Snowy and a dozen or so spectators who were looking at the pilot house sticking out of the pond like the conning tower of a surfacing submarine. A salvage barge and divers came in and plugged a hole in the hull. It was early evening when they pumped out the water and re-floated the boat. It was caked with mud.

The salvagers said the boat must have hit a rock. Snowy said they were crazy. The salvagers showed them the eight inch ragged hull gap they had temporarily patched. The insurance underwriter showed up and said he might have to write the boat off as a total loss.

Hawkins thanked him, then called the number Kelly had given him the night before. When his old commander answered, Hawkins said, “When did you join the mafia, commander?”

Kelly said he didn’t know what Hawkins was talking about.

When he learned about the loss of the navy contract and the Osprey, he said, “Wow. Double whammy. Don’t blame you for being pissed. Might be just a coincidence. Run of bad luck.”

“Bad luck didn’t punch a hole in my boat. Where are you?”

“At the war college.”

“Stay put, I’m on my way to Newport.”

Hawkins steamed with anger during the drive to Rhode Island, but he couldn’t contain a smile when he saw Kelly waiting at War College Gate 1. The granite-hard face was nestled in a cushion of heavy jowls, but the commander had maintained his fireplug physique and ramrod posture and he looked good in his tailored suit. Navy blue, of course.

Kelly climbed into the truck, shook Hawkins’ hand, and directed him through another security checkpoint to the two-story white stone structure that had housed Newport’s Asylum for the Poor until the navy took it over in 1884 for the war college. The building had been converted into a museum after the navy university and think tank expanded to a sprawl of multi-story buildings on Coasters Harbor Island, a couple of miles from the cliff mansions built by the Vanderbilts and Astors. Lights glowed in the first floor windows. Kelly led the way through the front entrance and along a hallway. He stopped in front of a closed door.

“I’m leaving you here. The folks inside are waiting for you.”

“Anyone I know?”

Kelly shook his head. “Like I said, I’m only the messenger. Got a call from an old higher-up who asked me to drag you here. My job is done. Good to see you. Looking great.”

Hawkins smiled at Kelly’s familiar machine gun delivery.

“Looks like life’s treating you well, too,” Hawkins said as they shook hands.

“Couldn’t be better. Terrific wife. Six beautiful grand kids. None interested in the navy. But I’m working on it.” He handed Hawkins a business card.

“Consultant on naval security?” Hawkins read off the card.

“Work with the Pentagon on foreign arms deals. Sort of a respectable arms dealer.” He jerked his thumb toward the closed door. “Good luck.”

“Thanks, commander. Great to see you.”

Kelly started down the hallway, only to stop as if he had forgotten his car keys.

“Remember what I said back in the old days about friendly fire?”

“Sure,” Hawkins said. “There is never anything friendly about a bullet coming your way, no matter who fires it. What aren’t you telling me, Jack?”

Kelly smiled but there was no mirth in his slate-gray eyes. “I hear things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Never seen it like this, Matt. Real snake pit. Just watch your ass. Make sure your perimeter is secure.”

His continued down the hallway, his hollow footsteps echoing on the wooden floor. With Kelly’s warning lingering in his ears, Hawkins knocked softly, half expecting a python or a cobra to answer. He was almost disappointed when a woman opened the door and greeted him with a pleasant smile.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Hawkins. My name is Anne Hilliard. We’ve been waiting for you.” Her voice was polite and as neutral as a telephone service recording.

Hilliard was a well-constructed woman in her fifties. She wore a canary-yellow two-piece suit with a high military-style collar. She had short hair the color of corn-silk and her face was wide and bland. She stepped aside to allow Hawkins into a room decorated with wall paintings of naval battles. Seated at a long, rectangular table of dark wood were three men and one woman.

Hilliard directed him to a vacant seat at one end of the table and took a chair at the other end.

“I’ll start by introducing myself,” Hilliard said. “I’m an assistant to the special counsel on security to the President. My boss advises the White House on the appropriate response to threats to our country. The people in this room constitute a task force that represents various entities charged with counter-strategy.”

She turned to an apple-faced man sitting to her right. “Dr. Fletcher?”

The man gave a slight nod. “My name is Charles Fletcher, Lieutenant Hawkins. I am a retired naval officer and I am fortunate to teach naval history at this historic institution. Since age is equated with wisdom, I have been asked to moderate this discussion.”

With his shiny cheeks, twinkling eyes, white goatee, tufts of cottony hair sticking out behind his ears and his prep school pseudo-British accent, Fletcher seemed to Hawkins like a character from a Dickens story. He wore a rumpled Oxford cloth shirt and striped necktie under a buff-colored vest that had a button missing,

Seated next to Fletcher was a man in his middle thirties dressed in a European cut charcoal pinstripe suit. His face was smooth and boyish and his perfectly shaped short blond hair looked as if it were painted on his head. His name was Ian Scanlon and he was with the Mid-East desk of the State Department.

A florid, heavy-set man wearing a naval officer’s uniform with a captain’s insignia introduced himself as Mike McCormick and said he was with naval intelligence. The last person to speak was a young woman named Natalie Glassman from the Homeland Security Department.

Hilliard picked up a dossier. “We all have been given copies of your personnel file and know about your distinguished combat career with the SEALs.”

“Then you all know that my distinguished navy career ended five years ago.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s in the file.”

Hawkins glanced at the faces around him. “In that event, could someone tell me why I’m here?”

“Fair question,” Fletcher said. “If Ms. Hilliard doesn’t mind, I will answer it with a question of my own. What do you know about Prester John?”

Hawkins stared at Fletcher and tweaked his mouth up in his trademark smirk. “Is that a serious question?”

“I assure you it is of the utmost seriousness.”

Hawkins dug into his memory. “As I recall, Prester John was a mythical king who ruled over some sort of lost Shangri-La kingdom.”

“Let me offer a few corrections. Prester John was not a myth. Nor was his kingdom. Both existed.”

“Fascinating, Dr. Fletcher,” Hawkins said, warily. “But I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”

“Bear with me, please.”

Hawkins nodded to be polite.

Fletcher smiled and went on. “The legend of Prester John had its origin in 12^th century Europe with rumors of a king, said to be descended from the Magi, who ruled a wealthy kingdom east of Babylon. Many expeditions tried to find him, but none were successful. Then in the 1100s, Pope Alexander III sent his physician Philip to deliver a message to the Prester asking for help fighting the infidels, who were pressing Christendom. Philip was known to have made it as far as Palestine, but was never seen again.”

“Thanks for the history lesson, but I still don’t know what this has to do with me.”

Scanlon answered the question. “We’ve recently become aware of findings that suggest Philip made it to the lost kingdom. And that Prester John gave him a fabulous treasure to take back to the Pope in Rome, but it was never delivered.”

Hawkins spread his hands apart. “And?”

The White House representative spoke.

“Your dossier said you have located a number of lost shipwrecks,” Hilliard said.

“That’s correct. I run a non-profit undersea exploration organization. Our goals are to expand knowledge and test new underwater equipment.”

“The U.S. government would like to enlist that expertise to find the treasure of Prester John,” Ms. Hilliard said.

“Since when has the U.S. government been in the treasure hunting business?”

Captain McCormick injected himself into the conversation. “Since the disposition of that treasure could have implications for national security, Hawkins.”

Unlike Fletcher, the navy officer didn’t use Hawkins’ military title.

“Maybe you could tell me about those implications, McCormick.”

McCormick’s face glowed traffic light red. “That’s Captain McCormick.”

“And it’s Lieutenant Hawkins, captain.”

The two men exchanged hard stares. Fletcher’s crisp voice broke the strained silence.

“Ms. Glassman, could you please explain the situation to the lieutenant?”

The Homeland Security representative said, “For some time now we have been picking up chatter about a plot against the United States.”

“What sort of plot?” Hawkins said.

“We don’t know yet. Only that it could involve even more victims than 9/11. We’re still following up every lead possible, but we’ve determined with certainty that it is the work of a splinter terrorist group which has named the plot the Prophet’s Necklace.”

“Unusual name,” Hawkins said. “Any idea what it means?”

“It’s a parable based on an Islamic morality story,” Glassman said. “In this story, a necklace given away by the Prophet’s daughter Fatima was considered blessed because it clothed and fed a beggar, bestowed means instead of helplessness, freed a slave, and was ultimately returned to its owner.”

Fletcher said, “We think that the perpetrators, a group which calls itself the Shadows, see this plot as their Prophet’s Necklace, empowering them and freeing them from the bondage of America.”

“Where does Prester John come in?” Hawkins said.

“The Shadows want to find the treasure before activating the plot. The treasure is said to include an emerald scepter that Prester John wielded as a symbol of his power. In sending it to the Pope he was saying that he was willing to join the fight to wipe Islam off the face of the earth. We think the Shadows believe that Prester John’s mystical power will flow to them in their fight against the infidels.”

“They wave the scepter around and then strike against their enemy. Not a bad display of showmanship,” Hawkins said.

“These people think in terms of thousands of years, and they are always looking for historical precedent to justify their cause. In their mind we’re nothing but re-born Crusaders. At the very least, having the treasure would recruit more fanatics to their failing cause.”

“How did the Shadows find out about the treasure?” Hawkins said.

Scanlon, from the State Department, took over.

“We suspect they heard about research being done by a historian named Cait Everson, who teaches at Georgetown University. Dr. Everson has published books and articles in which she suggests that the Prester John legend is true.”

“Did she mention the treasure in her writing?”

“Only peripherally. She was convinced that the treasure made it as far as Afghanistan. She thought State might be interested in her findings, given our country’s deep involvement in the region. She sent us a report.”

“Did the report say where in Afghanistan?” Hawkins said.

“Dr. Everson’s original letter only suggested a general location,” Hilliard said. “More recently she sent us an addendum pin-pointing the probable site.”

Hilliard rose and dimmed the lights. Using a laptop computer, she projected onto a wall screen a satellite photo of Afghanistan with a map overlay and pointed to a section of the country in the southwest.

Hawkins said, “We kept our guys out of that neighborhood. No one was really in control last I knew.”

“A drug warlord named Amir Khan controls the area, and so far he has managed to keep out both the government and insurgent factions.”

“Could you put your pointer on the treasure site?’ Hawkins said.

“Dr. Everson thinks the treasure is in this vicinity.”

She ran the pointer in a circle around a lake shaped somewhat like a lop-sided infinity symbol. The red dot landed on the edge of the lake.

“Based on what evidence?”

“A few years ago Dr. Everson was in Afghanistan doing research on ancient trade roads. She followed a little-known route to the lake and learned that before it was flooded it was called the ‘Valley of the Dead.’ According to local lore, the valley earned its name as a place where bandits entrapped caravans.”

Hawkins was intrigued. “Go on.”

“Dr. Everson researched the history of the valley and learned of an expedition back in the 1920s financed by a mining billionaire named Kurtz. He had come into possession of a fragment of a letter, purportedly written by Prester John, which mentioned a gift of a great treasure to the Pope. There was a map on the back of the letter. This is it.”

A roughly-drawn figure eight image appeared. Next to it was a drawing of what looked vaguely like an inverted U and below it, a small circle.

“What’s the significance of these wavy lines?”

“The hump shown here is an odd-shaped rock outcropping that Dr. Everson saw on her visit.” She pointed to the circle. “She thinks this represents a cave where the treasure could be.”

“It’s under water, in other words.”

“That’s right. Which is why Dr. Everson became even more excited when she learned that the Kurtz expedition had called for dive equipment and a diver.”

“Dr. Everson is a good detective. I’d like to talk to her,” Hawkins said.

“So would we. Dr. Everson vanished without a trace about a week ago.”

“Looks like someone dropped the ball at State by not getting back to her right away,” Hawkins observed.

“Wish I could say you’re wrong,” Scanlon said in a rueful tone. “The State Department doesn’t ordinarily deal with treasure hunts, but an intelligence analyst called her report to our attention and we tried to reach her. The university said she left a message that she was taking a leave of absence. No explanation.”

“No one has heard from her since?”

“We put out a trace. She flew to Zurich, but that’s as far as we were able to track her.”

“So you think her disappearance suggests that there is more to the story than legend.”

Natalie Glassman nodded.

“Dr. Everson had complained to Georgetown’s campus police about being stalked. The night before she disappeared there was an incident in Arlington, Virginia. She told the investigating officers that there had been an attempt to kidnap her.”

“And you think there’s some connection to the treasure and the Necklace plot?”

Heads nodded around the table.

Hawkins sat back in his chair and looked around the table, thinking he now knew how Alice must have felt at the March Hare’s tea party.

“Let’s see if I have this straight. You believe that if the crazies find the treasure they will pull the trigger on the necklace plot.”

“That’s essentially correct, lieutenant. We need to prevent that from happening.”

“So you want me to go into a remote part of Afghanistan that is controlled by a warlord and surrounded by insurgents and dive into a lake to find a treasure that may or may not exist.” Hearing no disagreement, Hawkins said, “No offense folks, but that is bat shit crazy.”

“Not at all,” Fletcher said. “We’ve considered your background as a SEAL, particularly your cave combat experience in Afghanistan, and the work of your non-profit group locating wrecks. Your submersible research at Woods Hole is well-documented.”

“It’s been a long time since I rappelled down a line from a helicopter.”

“Evidently, you’ve kept in shape,” Fletcher said. “You’ve run a number of half-marathons, right?”

Damn. Is there anything that’s not in that file? Hawkins thought.

“True, but I haven’t won any.”

“You came in near the top, though. A significant feat considering your injury, so physical incapacity is no excuse. We believe you’re the perfect man for the job.”

“The job you’re talking about is a suicide mission.”

“That’s not a given,” Hilliard said. “You would have all the resources of the government at your disposal. We would give you men and weapons.”

“Let’s talk about those resources,” Hawkins said. “We have the greatest military and intelligence-gathering forces in the world, but the task of preventing a horrendous attack on the United States of America would fall on the unworthy shoulders of a forty-something ex-SEAL.”

“I wouldn’t exactly put it that way,” Fletcher said.

“But I would. You all have my personnel file so you know I was kicked out of the navy with a psychiatric discharge. The navy said I was crazy. Good luck finding someone who’s even crazier to carry out this mission.”

He started to rise from his chair.

Captain McCormick snickered and looked around at the others.

“I told you this was the wrong guy for the job. Mr. Hawkins here doesn’t like anyone telling him what to do.”

“You’ve got me all wrong, captain. I don’t like being told what to do by navy guys with a puffed-up view of themselves.”

Fletcher made a palm-down gesture with his hands.

“Please hold on, gentlemen. Your comments are out of line, captain.”

McCormick glared at Hawkins. “Just saying out loud what was in the record. If you’ll excuse me. I need a smoke.”

Hawkins watched the officer storm out of the room. He turned to Fletcher. “And I think I need some air.”

Fletcher raised his hand to stay Hawkins and said to the others, “Would you allow us a few minutes? Lieutenant Hawkins and I need to have a serious talk.”

Hawkins shrugged as the room cleared out. He figured that with the Osprey out of commission and his navy contract in question he had nothing else to do.

“Talk away, Dr. Fletcher.”

Instead of going out for a smoke, Captain McCormick strode briskly to a nearby office building. Moments later he entered a sparsely furnished room. A gaunt man sat in front of a computer.

“Nice acting job,” the seated man said.

“Thanks.” The captain pulled up a chair. “I can only stay a few minutes or the others will wonder what I’m doing. How’s it going?”

The man pointed to the screen. “Pretty much as I figured. I’ll rerun the part you just missed.”

The screen showed Fletcher and Hawkins alone in the room.

“Sorry about the captain’s rudeness, Lieutenant Hawkins.”

“Thanks. But let’s face it — I’m not the person you need for a job this complicated.”

Fletcher tapped the dossier. “You’re pretty complicated yourself. May I call you Matt? Or maybe you would prefer your full name. Matinicus. Named for where you were born?”

“That name was inflicted on me by my parents. I was conceived on Matinicus Island. My mother was a flower child before she became an ornithologist. My father was a Maine lobster fisherman.”

“Then you can understand the importance of bait,” Fletcher said with a smile.

He slid a sealed envelope stamped Confidential across the table. Printed on a white label were the words: “Report on Matinicus Hawkins, Afghanistan, 2007. Summary of Findings.”

“Open it,” Fletcher said. “It won’t bite.”

Hawkins slowly bent the metal clasp, folded the flap back, and slid out a sheaf of papers. The report was impossible to read. Line after line had been blacked out.

“Someone had some fun with a Sharpie,” he said.

“I agree. It’s totally useless. However, I can place in your hands a copy that has not been redacted. Of course, you would have to be under naval jurisdiction, if only temporarily.”

Hawkins gazed at the envelope with half-lidded eyes then picked up the report. He knew more about fishing than Fletcher could ever know.

“I’d love to see the un-redacted version.”

“I don’t blame you. Your Afghanistan experience obviously has been gnawing away at you. You must want to know what happened.”

“Yeah,” Hawkins said, shifting in his chair. “Good thing this is as far as your offer goes. I feel myself weakening.”

“Then let me see if I can weaken you a bit more. Name it and it is yours if at all possible.”

“Okay. I want my psychiatric discharge reversed.”

“That’s—”

“Call it a down payment.”

Fletcher frowned. “It might take a while. We’re dealing with the navy bureaucracy.”

“It would be in your interest as well as mine. You wouldn’t want anyone to learn that a delicate mission was entrusted to a crazy man.”

“You raise a valid point, Mr. Hawkins.”

“I’m not through,” Hawkins said. “Who owns the operation if it flops?”

“The government would need plausible deniability. The story would be that you’re a rogue operation.”

“In that case, let’s add some truth to the spin. I want my own team and will make my own logistical arrangements.”

“But as you said, this is a big, complicated job,” Fletcher said.

“Which is why the simpler the better. I’ll let you know if I need help.”

“The situation is fluid and can tolerate no delay. We can give you a fully-equipped team ready to go as soon as you pack your toothbrush. How long will it take to pull together your own people?”

Hawkins cleared his throat. “Twenty-four hours. We can be ready to go in forty-eight.”

Fletcher looked as if Hawkins had told him the moon was made of green cheese. “There’s no margin for error. Everything would have to go off without a hitch.”

“That’s the way I want it.”

“Very well. I will insist, though, on daily updates, except when absolutely impossible.”

“I’ll do my best, but I will insist that we remain an independent entity. Since this is a last-minute job, I will need access to back up. Someone I can call with no questions asked.”

Fletcher nodded. “Very well, lieutenant. I’ll put you in contact with a provider.”

“I’ll need financial support.”

“You will have an open-ended bank account accessed by a secret number. Anything else?”

From the smile on Fletcher’s face, the question was meant to be sardonic, but the smug expression vanished when Hawkins said, “Yes there is. My research contract with the navy was canceled. I want it reinstated. And someone sabotaged my boat. I want reimbursement.”

“Those things are not connected with this mission.”

“Maybe you can connect them.”

Fletcher spread his palms apart. “I’ll do my best, but I must remind you again that time is crucial.”

Hawkins slid the envelope back across the polished surface of the table and rose from his chair. “In that case we’d better not waste another minute.”

McCormick watched on the screen as Hawkins left, then he said, “Never expected him to demand the psychiatric discharge and the other stuff. Didn’t you say he’d take the job for patriotic reasons with the report as sweetener?”

“His demands surprised me too.”

“I thought you said Hawkins was predictable.”

“Up to a point. He has a problem with self-control — he certainly responded to your demeaning taunts exactly the way I said he would.”

“Yeah, he wanted to tear my throat out. How do you reconcile that with his obvious control in negotiating a deal?”

“Are you familiar with chaos theory?”

“Somewhat. It says it’s impossible to predict accurately what a dynamic system will do. You know a hurricane is coming, but you’re not always sure where it will hit. What’s that got to do with anything?’

The gaunt man gestured at the screen. “Hawkins is chaos theory personified.”

McCormick said, “That’s not good. I read about his record in Tora Bora. He was with the SEAL unit that would have got Bin Laden the first time if command hadn’t screwed up. He makes Rambo look like Little Lord Fauntleroy, only he’s no muscle head. He thinks as well as he acts. Look at the way he just played Fletcher. I hope we’ve made the right choice.”

“We have. Don’t forget, I signed his psychiatric discharge papers. I know he’s intelligent. But Hawkins is headstrong and impulsive as well as smart. Look at his insistence, against all logic, on forming his own team. He’s like a guided missile. Point him in the right direction and he’ll explode. The unknown quantity is the extent of the damage. Predictable unpredictability.”

McCormick got up. “I have to get back to the meeting.”

As he walked the short distance to the former poorhouse, the captain chewed over the gaunt man’s assessment. He didn’t like the way Hawkins had taken command of the situation. Didn’t like it one bit.

But the chaos theory analogy bothered him even more. He shook his head and muttered under his breath.

“Predictable unpredictability, my ass.”

Quisset popped out of the doggy door on the front porch and greeted her master, then padded behind him as he climbed to his study carrying a computer disk Fletcher had given him and a glass of the whiskey Fido had liberated from the ocean bottom.

He settled behind his desk and slid the disk into the laptop. While the computer chirped through the booting up process he sipped his drink, wondering if he’d taken on the role of Johnny Carson in the old Mission Impossible parody, when the comedian gets stuck in the phone booth as the tape self-destructs. Funny, he thought, unless you’re the one in the exploding phone booth. Hawkins was no wide-eyed child. The war college meeting stank worse than a week-old codfish. The participants could have come from a casting company. The script had been orchestrated perfectly, with the navy guy playing bad cop to Fletcher’s good cop.

His instincts told him that the assignment was insane, but he needed to take it. Having his discharge reversed, his navy contract reinstated, and the Osprey reimbursed would be nice, but what he really wanted was to learn the truth about what happened five years ago to set him on the course to official derangement. And he was convinced he would find the answer back in Afghanistan.

The computer finished booting up, and Hawkins opened the folder on the disk. The first file it contained was a biography of Cait Everson. He gave her photograph more than a casual glance, memorizing the even features of the dark-haired woman.

Cait was a California girl. San Diego. She had majored in Middle-East and Central Asian history at UCLA, ultimately working her way up to her doctorate degree. She went on to teach at Georgetown as an associate professor. She had visited every country in the Mid-East region at least once and was fluent in or familiar with all of the region’s major languages. She had written several books on her specialty, the Silk Routes. She was in her thirties and already divorced.

He looked again at the photo. Hawkins’ love life had been sporadic since his divorce. Women liked his rugged good looks and his sense of humor, but they were put off when they learned that Hawkins viewed a long-term relationship as anything beyond three dates and a sleep-over.

Dr. Everson was smart as well as pretty. He hoped she hadn’t come to harm.

Hawkins next clicked on the report Cait had sent the State Department. It was entitled:

The report started with a detailed historic overview, fleshing out the Prester John summary Hawkins had heard in Newport. He quickly blew through this part and got right to Cait’s summation, which said:

“Based on the evidence, I have come to the following conclusions. Prester John was a real historical figure who ruled a kingdom whose location is yet to be determined. He received Pope Alexander’s letter and responded by sending the Pope a letter and a treasure, which disappeared in Afghanistan en route to Rome.”

He scrolled down to a document marked Exhibit A and entitled The Kurtz Expedition.

The document contained copies of newspaper articles, dating back to the 1920s, that chronicled the expedition Kurtz had led to Afghanistan. An archeologist with the expedition described the project as “desert road archaeology.” He explained that the ruins of ancient settlements often could be found along ancient caravan routes that seemingly led nowhere. The articles were arranged chronologically, spanning a number of months. The first headline read:

Datelined Ouray, Colorado, the article said that Hiram Kurtz, 58, owned a copper mining empire, but the newspaper apparently held him in little esteem, evidenced by the headline’s mocking tone. Still, it was essentially correct in describing the expedition’s purpose. Kurtz was quoted as saying that he hoped to locate archaeological sites along the forgotten trade routes, but he was particularly interested in stories of legendary women warriors.

Other clips, based on dispatches from Kurtz himself, told of him sailing from New Orleans on his private yacht across the Atlantic. He sailed across the Mediterranean, and through the Suez Canal to India, where he met up with a ship carrying his expedition staff and gear, including a customized Cadillac modified for desert driving. Then came the train journey to Kabul.

The dispatches became less frequent as the expedition set off into the wild countryside, until they eventually ceased altogether. Sensing a lost explorer story, The New York Times got in touch with an enterprising Reuters correspondent who learned that the expedition was still intact. He came across a list of supplies that had come through Kabul for delivery to Kurtz in the field. On the list were two pieces of gear called Schraders. It appeared that Dr. Everson had circled this term on her report and written the words “diving gear” beside it.

Hawkins took a moment to gaze at the Schrader helmet in his collection, then he looked back at the documents. Several months later, Kurtz had been in the news again when his expedition quietly arrived back in Kabul. The Reuters reporter caught up with him and reported that the Cadillac had blown its engine and been left behind. He asked where Kurtz had been. The laconic reply became the headline as well as the story:

“I have been to the Valley of the Dead.”

The article reported that a member of Kurtz’s team had died in an excavation cave-in, suggesting the reason for the tycoon’s mournful reply. But the expedition’s misfortune didn’t end there. It made tragic headlines again just a few weeks later. The archaeologist and other key expedition people died when the Kurtz company minerals carrier they were traveling on sank in the Mediterranean during a fierce meltemi. Kurtz was sailing separately on his yacht or he would have been lost as well. The reclusive Kurtz went back to Colorado. His health had been compromised by the rigors of travel and he died a short while later.

The next few documents detailed more of Dr. Everson’s findings. In one, she described how she had been hunting for traces of lost trade routes in Afghanistan and had come across a lake that was still called the Valley of the Dead.

In another, she revealed how her research had led her to an out-of-print book about the Kurtz expedition, written in 1933, called “The Emerald Sceptre.” The author had relied mostly on news reports, but he had learned from the widow of a project archaeologist about a sheet of ancient vellum the expedition found that may have been part of a longer document.

A message on the vellum, written in Latin, mentioned a great treasure that included an emerald scepter as a gift to the Pope. The letter was signed by Prester John and had what appeared to be a crude diagram on the back. Since no treasure had ever been found, the author speculated that it might have been carried on the freighter Kurtz lost. End of story. Or not.

Hawkins sat back in his chair.

The evidence was sketchy, but Cait believed it suggested that the legend of the treasure was true, and that it might still be in Afghanistan. Believed it enough, at least, to contact the State Department.

Hawkins glanced at his watch. It was one in the morning. If he was going to assemble a team, he needed to get started. He reached for his phone and punched in a name. After several rings, a female voice answered with a sleepy hello.

“Matt? Is that really you?” the voice said.

“Isn’t caller ID a wonderful thing, Abby?”

“Only if you have the brains not to answer the damned phone. How’s my “ex” these days?”

“Fine. I have to see you. How about tomorrow?”

Pause. “Hell, Matt it’s already tomorrow. I’m in the middle of a bunch of big projects. Can it wait?”

“No. It’s important.”

“Where are you now?”

“In my house at Woods Hole.”

Another pause. “The only time I have free is at eight tomorrow morning.”

“Thanks. I’ll be there,” Hawkins said.

They said their good-byes and hung up.

Matt then made a quick phone call to make arrangements for the next day. After he hung up, his eye again fell on the photo of Cait Everson, and he wondered if she were dead or alive. And if she were alive, where she might be.

He ignored his instincts and took the positive view. “Good night, pretty lady,” he said. “Can’t wait to meet you.”

Then he shut down his computer and went to bed.

The 1921 butternut-colored Cadillac touring car with the over-sized tires churned up a dusty rooster tail as it raced across the desert at more than sixty-five miles per hour. Amir Khan had an expression of child-like joy on his face as he looked over the steering wheel down the length of the long louvered hood that covered the powerful 5.1 liter V-8 engine.

Sitting next to Amir in the seven-passenger vehicle was a ghost-like figure whose hair and face were shrouded under a light blue keffiyah. In the back seats were four men wearing traditional tribal garb: round Pakol caps, long shirts, vests and baggy pants. Cartridge belts encircled their waists and they clutched AK-47s with the barrels angled in the air.

The car swerved off the dirt track, bumped over the rough terrain, and came to a skidding stop near the edge of a large lake. The armed men jumped from the car and shouldered their guns. Each man grabbed a wooden pole from the trunk.

Amir got out next, followed by the shrouded figure who partially removed the keffiyeh, keeping the hair covered but exposing the face of Cait Everson. Cait unfolded a sheet of paper and glanced at a drawing that looked like a camel’s hump. She compared it with the hill set back a mile or so from the lake. The mound was flatter than in the sketch, but it may have been higher in the past. She and Amir walked to the edge of a cliff that overhung the blue surface of the lake around thirty feet below. The guards stretched out in a line, roughly three feet apart, and walked slowly, striking the ground with the pole tips. Cait and Amir followed. After advancing several yards, one of the men stopped and pointed to his feet.

Amir stepped ahead and struck the ground near the guard with his cane. A hollow noise echoed up from the earth. The guards used knives to scrape away the top soil, uncovering a square metal plate around four feet across. They lifted the plate off to reveal a rectangle of darkness.

Cait produced a flashlight from under her smock and dropped to her knees. Ignoring Amir’s warning to watch out for the crumbling edges, she leaned over the opening. The flashlight beam was absorbed by the darkness.

“The Kurtz mine shaft,” Cait murmured. She stood up and dusted off her hands. “I’m going in.”

“The mine is very old. You may be putting yourself in danger.”

“The supporting timbers along the walls look okay,” Cait said. “I’ll be all right. You can pull me out if I get into trouble. Don’t forget, I’m an experienced archaeological field worker.”

Amir had mentioned the shaft to Cait over dinner the previous day. He had assumed it was the work of Russian geologists who surveyed the area years before, but Cait had become excited and insisted on seeing it. Amir had come to regard Cait almost like a daughter. And as with the pleading of his own daughters, he found it difficult to say no.

He gave an order and a man drove the car close to the shaft. Cait retrieved her duffle bag from the trunk and dug out a yellow hard hat equipped with a headlamp, and a pair of fingerless gloves, goggles and knee pads. She kept the head covering in place, but slipped out of the smock she had been wearing and shed her pajama-like pants. Underneath she wore a tan long-sleeve shirt and cargo slacks. She tucked a walkie-talkie into her shirt pocket and gave another one to Amir.

She dug into the duffle again and pulled out a nylon harness attached to a two-hundred-foot-long length of half inch manila rope. Cait’s explorations of old ruins sometimes brought her into tunnels and shafts where she might need help getting out. While she buckled into the harness, Amir’s men tied the other end of the rope onto the front bumper of the car. Cait put on the goggles, knee-pads and gloves and sat down at the edge of the shaft with her legs dangling. Four guards picked up the rope. She slipped over the edge and was lowered several feet until she ordered a halt to look around. As she dangled there, she reflected on the events that had brought her to this dark hole in the desert.

She had visited Afghanistan three years before to do research into the vast transcontinental network of paths that had extended more than four thousand miles between China and western Asia and Europe and northern Africa.

The routes were collectively called the Silk Road, but they had been used to transport other goods, including amber, slaves, incense and precious stones. The roads were also conduits of culture, technology, disease, such as the Black Death, and they had laid the foundation for the global economy,

Cait had been researching the southern silk route which still existed in part as the Karakoram Highway, a paved road connecting Pakistan and China. Using a technique known as desert road archeology, she had followed old traffic routes looking for commercial settlements around caravan stops that were often rich archaeological troves. One route in particular piqued her interest. On an old map she acquired, this route branched off from the main road for no apparent reason, eventually coming to a dead end near a lake. She suspected that the area around the lake may have been the site of commercial activity.

Returning to Kabul, she showed some Afghan colleagues her findings and said she wanted to see the site firsthand. They told her the territory was dangerous, controlled by warlords who made their living in the drug trade.

The lake was under the control of a warlord named Amir Khan. Cait expressed interest in learning more about Amir. A friend at the American embassy arranged a meeting with a cultural attaché, a title Cait knew was often a cover for CIA personnel. Frank Brady was a trim man in his fifties who had a thoughtful professorial manner that suggested he was probably an analyst rather than a field agent.

“Amir was on the American payroll during the war against the Soviets,” he said. “Got wounded in action. He suffered some nerve damage and almost didn’t walk again. He was brought to the United States and treated at Walter Reed hospital. Spent months in therapy. While he was recuperating, he studied at Georgetown University. From what I hear of the efficient way he runs things as a warlord, he must have majored in business administration.”

Without hesitating, Cait said, “Can you get a message from me to the Amir?”

“What sort of message?” Brady said warily.

“Tell him that a Georgetown history professor is interested in doing research in his neighborhood and see what he says.”

Brady chuckled. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“It never hurts to ask.”

“I’ll see if I can make a connection. Where are you staying?”

“At the Serena Hotel. I’ll be waiting for your call.”

That night Cait got a call from Brady. “You Georgetown alum must be pretty tight, Dr. Everson. The Amir would be pleased to have you as his guest.”

Cait was stunned. The alumni ploy had been a gamble.

“I’d be pleased to accept his invitation,” she said. “Any idea how I get there?”

“Be at the airport at seven tomorrow morning.”

Cait thanked Brady, and as an afterthought, asked if he had any advice on how to deal with a warlord.

“Keep your blinders on and you’ll be fine,” Brady said.

Cait packed a bag with her field clothes and equipment. She spent a restless night and was awake when the sun came up over the mountains. It was only a twenty-minute taxi ride to Khawaja Rawash airport and she arrived well ahead of time.

What followed was like something out of a spy movie. She was met by a man who said he was the Amir’s assistant in Kabul, led to a private two-engine plane, and ushered on without a word. After a two-hour flight, the plane angled down for its descent. On the approach, Cait glimpsed the figure-eight lake she had seen in the satellite photos. Minutes later, they bumped down onto a crude unpaved landing strip near a large metal hangar.

After the door was unlatched, Cait climbed down the gang way, blinking her eyes in the bright sunlight. An antique touring car was parked at the edge of the runway. Leaning against a front fender of the convertible was a tall man dressed in a traditional Afghan outfit. He waved and then walked over with the aid of a cane, and extended his hand.

“Welcome, Dr. Everson. I am Amir Khan.”

His voice was deep and resonant, and he spoke in American English with a trace of an Afghan accent. He had a raffish handlebar mustache that looked bleach-white against his dark skin. He wore a flat mushroom-shaped cap over gray hair.

He opened the door on the passenger side for her, and then got behind the wheel. The car passed acres of agricultural fields and a number of large sheds. Cait heeded Brady’s advice and kept her blinders on. Eventually, the car arrived at a walled cluster of buff-colored, flat-roofed buildings, passed through an unmanned gatehouse, and made its way along an unpaved street toward the largest building in the village.

The stone-and-mud house was surrounded by well-landscaped greenery. Amir pulled the car up in front of the high arched wooden door. A man appeared seemingly from nowhere and carried Cait’s bag to the doorstep.

An attractive woman in her thirties opened the door. Her head was covered with an orchard silk scarf and she wore a traditional black smock. A little girl with huge brown eyes hung on her dress.

“This is my daughter Nagia and one of my granddaughters, little Yasmeen,” Amir said.

Nagia bowed slightly and picked up the bag. “Please follow me,” she said in English.

She led Cait along a wide marbled hallway to a room furnished with an art deco bed and a dresser that could have come from Paris. French doors looked out on a garden area. Nagia said that her father would be waiting in the garden. Cait bathed her face in cooling rose water and checked to make sure her hair wasn’t a mess.

In the center of the garden was a small gazebo that shaded a carved wooden table and chairs. Cait sat in a chair and waited a minute or so before Amir appeared, trailing an elderly female servant who carried a tray with a pitcher and two glasses and a plate of pastry. The sheik had changed from his traditional outfit into tan slacks and a white shirt. The servant filled the glasses and went back into the house. They both took a sip of the amber liquid.

“Iced jasmine tea. Hope you like it.”

Cait let the cooling liquid roll down her throat.

“It’s delicious,” she said. She glanced around the garden.

“You seem ill at ease, Dr. Everson. Is there anything wrong?”

“Not at all.” She smiled. “It’s just not what I imagined. Actually, I didn’t know what to expect—”

“Of a warlord?” he said, completing her sentence. “The term is a misnomer. Most of us are not at war. Nor are we lords. In the U.S. you would call us agri-businessmen.”

They both smiled. The inside joke broke the ice, and soon they were talking about their Georgetown link. That led to a discussion of Cait’s work, which in turn brought up the purpose of her visit.

“I’m looking for evidence of settlements along an ancient road that branched off from the Silk Road only to end suddenly at the lake I saw flying in,” she said.

“It was called The Valley of the Dead before it filled with water, supposedly released from heavy bombing during the second Anglo-Afghan war,” Amir said. “Local lore has it that my ancestors would lure caravans into the valley to be trapped and looted of their riches. I don’t mean to discourage you, but your trip here may have been for nothing. There’s no trace of the old road.”

Cait sensed that her host had satisfied his curiosity and was about to blow her off. She was pondering her next move when fate intervened. Yasmeen had crept up behind her grandfather. She had a mischievous expression on her face as she reached around him, snatched a small cake and stuffed it into her mouth. The dry cake caught in her throat, and the look of sweet-tooth bliss in her eyes turned to one of tearful terror as her round face began to turn purple.

Amir saw what was happening. He grabbed the little girl, lifted her in the air, and gave her body a shake. Cait sprang to her feet.

“No!” she shouted.

She snatched Yasmeen from her grandfather’s arms and applied the Heimlich method from behind, taking care not to break the girl’s ribs. The greasy crumbs were expelled after a few tries. Yasmeen let out the cry that had been stuck in her throat. It was the sweetest sound Cait had ever heard.

The girl’s mother came running from the house and scooped the bawling girl from Cait’s arms. She and her father had a rapid conversation, then she turned to Cait, smiled, and said, “Thank you.” She disappeared back into the house with the girl.

“Sorry to grab her away,” Cait said. “I took a basic CPR course once.”

Amir took her hand, bowed slightly and pressed it to his forehead.

“Please. No apology. I am in your debt. I would consider anything you wish to be my command.”

Cait spent three nights as Amir’s guest. He gave her a tour of the lake, showing her where the track once entered the valley, but there was no evidence of ruins. The bandits who had swarmed the area were nomads and left no clue behind. He said that an expedition had explored the area years before, supposedly led by a rich American named Kurtz, but it left suddenly, abandoning the touring car, which Amir had found being used as a chicken coop and restored.

He drove Cait to the air strip on the third day. Before she climbed into the plane, Amir told her that she would always be welcome. She never dreamed that three years later she would take him up on his offer.

Cait took a deep breath, exhaled, and jerked on the rope.

“Lower away,” she shouted.

She began her plunge into the blackness. At one point in her descent she looked up. The opening was a rectangle of blue sky that seemed no bigger than a postage stamp and getting smaller. The dank air triggered coughing fits.

Amir’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“Yes, fine.”

She wasn’t quite telling the truth. The support timbers were deteriorated and many were missing. She snapped off photos with her digital camera to divert her precarious state of mind. She was engrossed in her task when a shocking cold wetness enveloped her feet and ankles.

Water!

Then something grabbed at her legs. Her headlamp revealed what looked like the writhing coils of a thick black snake. She pointed the camera down and punched the shutter with a vague notion in her mind that the flash would scare it away.

She tried to dig out her radio, but in her haste it slipped from her hand. She jerked on the line. Instead of being pulled up, she continued her plunge until the water and coils were around her waist. She was almost frozen in panic. Her heart hammered in her chest. She wanted to scream, but the sound caught in her throat.

The water was nearly up to her chin when the descent stopped. The rope tenders had detected a change in tension and began to reel her up. She popped out of the water, feeling one last horrifying brush of the coils along her legs. Her elbows and knees scraped the sides of the shaft, but she was no longer worried about a cave-in. She wanted out! She was shivering like a leaf when Amir’s men pulled her into the sunlight.

Seeing Cait’s muddied clothes and pale features, Amir said, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fi-fine, thanks,” she said.

He escorted her back to the car and ordered his men to get a blanket from the car’s trunk. She sat in the passenger seat, with the blanket wrapped around her body, and sipped strong tea.

Once her shivering was under control, she looked at the photo she had taken in the shaft then showed to image to Amir.

“It looks like a section of rubber hose,” he said.

Cait nodded. “Kurtz dug that shaft to try to get down to the treasure cave, but the hose suggests that his diver died in a wall collapse,” she said. “After that happened he wrapped up his expedition and headed home. Which is probably what I should do. I don’t want to end up the same way. Sorry to waste your time, Amir.”

He slid in behind the steering wheel, started the car and put it into gear. “You must not be discouraged. Remember that a river is made drop by drop.”

The Kahn had sprung his enigmatic proverbs before, but she was in no mood for homespun Afghan philosophy. She had spent too many years and traveled too many miles. Her patience was exhausted.

As they drove off, she glanced at the lake with yearning eyes and made a reluctant admission to herself.

For all intents and purposes, her Prester John theory was as dead as the diver buried in the mine shaft.

The headquarters for Global Logistics Technologies occupied the top floor in one of the faceless buildings that cluster around Washington like suckling young around a mother sow. With its minimalist design, the three-story glass and aluminum structure easily blended in with the other corporate lairs along the Lee Highway in Fairfax, Virginia. The architectural anonymity was no accident. Many of GLT’s world-wide operations handled military contracts that demanded the utmost in secrecy.

Abby liked the bee-hive atmosphere generated by the scores of offices and cubicles. The busy environment, with its sharply delineated, yet integrated roster of duties, reminded her of the aircraft carrier she had served on during her navy career and suited her no-nonsense personality. She kept the door of her comfortable but plainly-furnished office open so she could simultaneously absorb and broadcast the energy flow.

As with every morning, she had arisen at 5:30 and had a breakfast of Kenyan coffee, fruit and whole grain toast without butter. She watched the morning news as she ran on her treadmill, then she showered and slipped into one of her conservative dark outfits that were as close as she could get to a Navy uniform without looking as if her designer was John Paul Jones.

She had driven her silver-colored Mercedes SL convertible from her country home in Leesburg, arriving in her office promptly at seven o’clock, and had glanced first thing at the agenda for the staff meeting scheduled for 8:30. She jotted a few notes and had started to go over a contract to provide army depot support when she felt what ghost-hunters call a presence. A feeling that she was not alone.

She looked around the edge of the oversized computer monitor. Hawkins was leaning against the door frame. He was wearing a visitor’s ID in the lapel of his blue blazer and had a lopsided grin on his bearded face.

Abby’s jaw sagged in disbelief. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Don’t you remember our phone conversation a few hours ago?”

“Of course I do!”

“Then you’ll remember telling me I had to get here by eight.” He pointed at the wall clock, which read 7:55.

“But I never imagined—”

“That I could be here as promised?”

“Well, yes.”

Hawkins wouldn’t have imagined it either. After he contacted Abby the night before, he had used the special number Fletcher had given him to call if he needed support services. In this case, back up had come in the form of a ride on a private jet and the use of a car with government plates. Having Fletcher’s number was akin to having a genii in a magic lamp.

“How’d you get here so quickly?” Abby asked.

“I caught a ride to Washington on a Navy plane,” he explained. “My Woods Hole ID got me past your security.”

Abby remembered the outrageous statements Matt had made after his Navy discharge and wondered if his off-the-wall claim was the sign of a mental relapse.

Forcing a smile onto her lips she crooned, as if talking to a dim-witted child, “Matt, you’re not even in the Navy anymore.”

Hawkins stepped into the office and flopped into a chair. “You have any coffee?”

Abby used the intercom and called for a pot of coffee and two cups, which arrived within minutes.

“You’re looking well,” she said, staring at Matt over the rim of her cup.

“Thanks. And you are as lovely as ever.”

“Thank you. Tell me more about that navy ride,” she said.

Hawkins had tuned into the patronizing tone, but he took a sip of coffee and said, “Please call the Naval War College in Newport and ask for Dr. Charles Fletcher. Tell Dr. Fletcher I’m thinking of using your company.”

“Who’s Dr. Fletcher?” she said.

He nodded toward the computer screen. “Look him up on the website.”

Humor him, she thought. Bring him gently back to reality. With a smile frozen on her face, she Googled the war college site and clicked Fletcher’s name from the staff listings. A photo and biography of Fletcher popped up.

Hawkins studied Abby as she read about Fletcher and called the war college number. Her dark red hair was parted in the middle, and cut short, curving down in points to her chin, framing the same beautiful face he had fallen in love with when they had first met on board ship. The high bridge nose and haughty upward tilt to her chin should have warned him of her strong personality, but he had been intent on her lush body. Once they were ashore, they had begun a heated courtship that culminated a short time later in their marriage.

Abby’s call had gotten through.

“Matt Hawkins asked me to call you, Dr. Fletcher. He’s here in my office. He says you can vouch that he is on Navy duty. Oh he’s not.” She smiled in triumph at Hawkins.

“I’m not officially working for the navy,” Hawkins said in a low voice.

“He says he’s not officially with the navy, Dr. Fletcher.” The smile vanished. “Oh. He’s been given a consulting assignment? Yes. I’ll do that. Thank you.”

She hung up and stared at Hawkins.

“Your Dr. Fletcher confirms that you are consulting for a special assignment. I’d like to know more.”

Matt got up and closed the door. Then he returned to his chair and gave her an account of his meeting at the War College. Her brow darkened as he told her about the assignment to find a lost treasure in the wilds of Afghanistan. She placed her hands palm down on her desk and gazed at him with a soft expression in the big blue-green eyes that had always reminded Hawkins of tropic seas.

“We weren’t married very long, but I still care a lot about you and your welfare.”

“I still feel the same about you, Abby.”

She allowed herself a quick smile. “What you have just described is a dangerous, may I say, insane mission. You could be killed.”

“I know that. Which is why I’ve come here to ask for your help. I need your logistics expertise.”

Abby shook her head. “Matt, look around you, for god sakes. Do you know how many projects we’re juggling? GLT is an international contractor. We’ve got sixteen hundred employees here and around the world. We’re not just military; we serve the commercial and humanitarian sectors as well. We’re moving warplanes and tow tractors. Barracks and kitchens. We make sure that equipment gets where it is needed, when it is needed, anywhere in the world.”

“That last phrase sounds like a marketing slogan,” Hawkins said.

“It is,” Abby replied. “I came up with it.”

“I like it,” Hawkins said.

“Thanks. Here’s the bottom line. The government’s outsourcing more and more jobs to companies like ours. In addition to keeping military supply lines open, I’m up to my ears setting up camps at a half dozen disaster locations. We’ve got goods and people moving on planes and ships around the world. There’s no company in the U.S. that does the kind of stuff we’re doing, the way we do it.”

Hawkins had followed his ex-wife’s career since she left the Navy, feeling an indirect pride as he watched her form one of the biggest logistics corporations in the country, eventually becoming its CEO. Her success didn’t surprise anyone who had watched her meteoric rise through the Navy after graduating with honors from the Naval Academy at Annapolis.

“Hell, Abby, you just made my argument for me. It’s like the Carley Simon song from that James Bond movie. No one in the world does it better than GLT.”

“I won’t disagree with that, but let me ask you a question. I hope you won’t take this the wrong way. But given your hostile attitude towards the Navy, why did they choose you to go on a mission that has national security at stake?”

“I asked the same question. Fletcher said I was uniquely qualified, whatever that means.”

“Even with the unique circumstances of your discharge?”

“Those circumstances will no longer stand after this mission.” He told her about his bargain with Fletcher.

“You really are determined about this, Matt.”

“I think that’s self-evident.”

Abby pursed her lips in thought. “I’m not saying I will take this job, but if I did, what would you offer in return?”

“Name it.”

“Okay then. Two conditions. First I want you to purge your mind of that whole episode in Afghanistan.”

“Easier said than done, Abby. I can lock up my memories, but I still walk with a limp.”

“I’m sorry about that, but you’ve got to forget the past. You know how damaging your obsession has been.”

Hawkins was well aware that his moods and outbursts after his return from Afghanistan had helped destroy their marriage. She had been riding high with her career and had a hard time dealing with his suspicions that her beloved Navy had not only failed him but turned on him.

“I apologize for all that,” he said. “You’re a good woman, Abby.”

“Thanks,” she said with a quick smile. “But it’s you I care about. Your obsession will kill your chances for a normal life.”

“I have a normal life.”

“Oh really, Mr. Normal. When was the last time you had a meaningful romantic relationship?”

Without thinking about it, Hawkins said, “With you.”

Silence ensued for a moment. Then Abby said, “Do you really believe that national security is involved in this crazy mission? That if we don’t stop this treasure grab, thousands of people will die?”

“That’s what I’ve been told, Abby. That’s all I can say.”

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

Hawkins blinked at the quick decision. He sighed with relief. “Thanks, Abby.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I said there was a second condition. I go to Afghanistan with you. I travel to Kabul several times of year for my work so I can call this a business trip.”

Hawkins had no intention of having his ex-wife on the mission. He’d let her go as far as Kabul and dump her.

“Thanks, Abby. I’ll teleconference you tomorrow night to go over strategy.”

“I’ll start the ball rolling as soon as you leave. Who else is on our team?”

“No one yet. You were the first one I asked.”

Abby rolled her eyes. “In that case you’d better get busy.”

She saw him to the door and came back to her desk. She was smiling as she punched out the number for her operations department. Seeing Matt again reminded her that life with Hawkins had never been a bed of roses. But it was seldom dull.

Professor Akram Saleem had just emerged from his classroom when he noticed the tall stranger wading through the crowd of students and academics milling along the hallway. The man’s face looked as if it had been chiseled from oak and he had a physique like a longshoreman. He projected an easy confidence and there was an eagle’s alertness in his dark probing eyes.

He drew nearer, walking with a slight limp, and the professor saw that he clutched a copy of the latest book Cait Everson had written on the ancient trade routes. The professor’s smile clicked into place automatically and he stepped into the man’s path.

“I see you’re a fan of Dr. Everson’s writing,” Saleem said.

The man glanced at the book’s cover which showed a string of camels silhouetted against a red desert sunset. The Title was: “Trading Post Archaeology: The Role of the Silk Roads in Globalization.”

“I picked this up at the college bookstore. Have you read it?”

“Oh yes! Some people might find it dry, but it’s a well-written exposition. Dr. Everson is one of the foremost experts on ancient trade routes.”

Hawkins turned the book over to show the photo of Dr. Everson on the jacket. “You sound as if you know her.”

“I am Professor Akram Saleem, a colleague of Dr. Everson’s.”

Hawkins extended his hand in a vise grip. “Nice to meet you, Professor. My name is Matt Hawkins. I run a non-profit outfit called SeaSearch. We find lost ships, purely for educational and historical purposes.”

“What brings you to the history department?”

“I was researching old trading routes and came across a reference to Dr. Everson. I happened to be in Washington, and decided to see if I could talk to her.”

“I’m very sorry,” the professor said. “Dr. Everson is on indefinite leave of absence.”

“It was a last-minute impulse. Maybe another time. I’m not surprised she’s away. She says in the introduction to the book that she spends a lot of time doing field work.”

“Yes, she’s fearless when it comes to research. She believes there is no substitute for physically being at a historic site. Is there any area of particular interest to you? Perhaps I could be of help.”

“Thanks, Professor. Dr. Everson and I are both detectives of sorts. She researches land routes. I do the same on the sea. I wanted to compare methods.”

“I can put a note in her mailbox, if you’d like.”

Hawkins took a business card from his billfold, jotted down a note on the back asking her to call and handed it to the professor. They chatted a few more minutes, and then Hawkins glanced at his watch and said he had to go. Hawkins thanked the professor for his time and headed for the parking lot. The professor watched thoughtfully until Hawkins disappeared around a corner, and then went back to his office.

He looked for SeaSearch using Google and called up an impressive website that displayed photos of the dozen or so shipwrecks that Hawkins’ organization had found. He clicked on a picture of Hawkins and read the biographical sketch, starting with his most recent career at Woods Hole developing robots for underwater exploration and salvage. Then he came to the part about Hawkins’ service record and a frown crossed his usual smiling face.

Hawkins is a navy veteran with the rank of lieutenant. He served with a SEALs unit in Iraq and later in Afghanistan.

Saleem’s eyes narrowed. Why would a former navy diver and specialist in underwater salvage come looking for Cait? Coincidence? He read the biography again and looked up a number of related links that added texture to Hawkins’ background.

The professor’s interest went beyond mere curiosity.

With his friendly absent-minded professorial manner and warm smile, Professor Saleem epitomized the old descriptive cliché: a gentleman and scholar. He had gained the respect of faculty and student alike for his firm grasp of Mid-East and central Asian history. He was a bona fide historian who had gone to school in the United States and had made numerous friends along the way, qualities that gave him the ideal cover for his real job as an agent for the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, Pakistan’s foremost intelligence agency.

He had been recruited by his cousin Mohamed, a high-ranking ISI official, who had realized the professor had the two greatest assets for a spy: accessibility and invisibility. Mohamed sent him through training and bundled him off as an exchange professor to Georgetown, hoping that his professorship would allow him to worm his way into corners of the U.S. establishment that embassy spies could never enter.

His on-going assignment was to ferret out hints of a U.S. raid that would wipe out Pakistan’s nuclear capability, a paranoid fear of the ISI and the military. The arrangement promised more than it produced. Most of what he sent home was interesting but useless. He had little access to the real power centers of government, but kept his assignment secure by sending snippets of academic cocktail party gossip to his cousin.

At times the informational well went dry, and that’s when he became desperate. It was during one of these dry spells that Dr. Everson told him her latest Prester John theory. He’d listened politely, not thinking there was any value to the information. When she mentioned sending a letter to the State Department, his ears perked up. He had transmitted the story to Pakistan, not because he believed that Prester John and his treasure were real but because he had nothing else at the moment. Mohamed had given the report short shrift, as expected, but when Saleem’s cousin got the follow-up message pin-pointing the treasure site, he set in motion an elaborate and risky plot.

The professor reached for his phone and punched out a number. The call was patched through several blind circuits that would make it difficult to trace.

A male voice answered, “Good to hear from you, my cousin.”

“You won’t think so when I tell you the news. We have a problem.”

“What sort of problem?”

“A very big one.”

Hawkins drove directly to the airport from Georgetown. He was preoccupied with his thoughts, and unaware of the black Chrysler van that had been waiting for him at Reagan airport and had followed him, first to Global Logistics, then to Georgetown University.

The van tailed him back to the airport car rental return. The man behind the wheel had premature white hair and icy blue eyes. His passenger, who was acting as spotter, was his identical twin. The van pulled up at the departure entrance and the passenger got out. The driver made a loop around the airport and when he returned, his twin was waiting for him.

He got in the van and reported that he had followed Hawkins as far as the security line. As they drove away from the airport he called a number on his cell phone.

A gravelly voice that had been digitally altered came on the line.

“Report.”

The passenger gave a detailed description of their surveillance.

There was a pause, and then the altered voice spoke again.

“I want you to concentrate on one thing and one thing only,” the voice said.

“What’s that?”

The order was short and chilling.

“Terminate Hawkins. Make him disappear. And do it as soon as possible.”

Calvin Hayes stood in the tower of the 25,000-ton Handysize class bulk carrier and watched a man in a thirty-foot Superboat bobbing in the water below bring a pipe-shaped object to his shoulder. A starburst blossomed from the tip of the pipe and a brilliant white streak shot across the carrier’s high bow. Hayes’ eyes followed the rocket’s trajectory and his mouth stretched in a wide grin.

He was dressed in a tailored olive suit and dark green shirt that went well with his dark chocolate complexion. A custom-made yellow silk power tie was knotted around his thick neck. Hayes was always impeccably dressed, but no one would mistake him for a fop. Hayes shaved his scalp and his ears were close to his bullet head. The nose between the high cheekbones had been flattened by a hard right during a boxing match, a match he had gone on to win. A broad-shouldered, six-foot-one physique rounded out the picture. But the tough guy look was tempered by the mischievous gleam in his molasses-colored eyes.

Hayes lowered the binoculars and turned to a pair of men dressed in conservative dark business suits.

“Gentlemen,” Hayes said in his soft Louisiana drawl, “With your permission, I will proceed with the next phase of the demonstration.”

The older of the two men was Hank Spence, the razor-eyed CEO of the shipping company that owned the cargo ship. His young assistant was Skyler Horton, a graduate of the Harvard Business School.

“Go ahead,” Spence said with no change in his flinty expression.

Hayes nodded and turned to the ship’s commander, a veteran skipper named Rollins. “Please proceed with the new defensive protocol, captain.”

Rollins called the engine room and ordered full stop. The ship coasted several hundred yards before its weight and hull resistance overcame the momentum carrying it forward. As the ship lay dead in the water, the powerboat darted in.

Hayes turned back to Spence and Horton.

“Here’s how the scene typically plays out in a pirate attack. The pirates shoot a real projectile across the bow, not a rocket I picked up in a fireworks shop. Then they board the stopped ship. They corral the crew, take the captain hostage and order him to bring the ship closer to land where it can be looted while ransom is being negotiated. Eventually the crew and ship may be released, but the cargo will go to the four winds.” He paused for drama. “Unless you hire Secure Ocean Services to protect your investment. I’ll let the captain take it from here.”

Rollins picked up a microphone that would carry his orders to all parts of the ship.

“This is the captain speaking. All hands to the safe room.” He repeated the order two more times, then said, “If you’ll excuse us.” He and his officers left the bridge in a disciplined fashion.

“Where are they going?” Spence said.

“They will join the rest of the crew in a high-security compartment. They have supplies for two weeks and communication with the outside world.” He glanced out one of the big windows that wrapped around the pilot house. “The pirate grapples are hooked onto the port rail. We’re about to have company.”

Four men climbed over the rail. They were dressed in shorts and T-shirts, the standard uniform of Somali pirates, and wore rags around their heads. As the men slipped automatic weapons off their shoulders, the ship’s engines restarted and the cargo vessel began to move.

“Forgot to mention that the captain can control the ship from the secure room,” Hayes said.

“So what?” Spence said. “Those guys will get back in their boat and sink the ship with their rockets.”

“Not if you’ve hired my company,” Hayes said. He raised the radio to his lips and uttered one word. “Now.”

The pirates had started across the deck toward the base of the bridge tower. They walked single file, AK-47s at waist level. Halfway to their destination, the last man in line crumpled to the deck. Then the pirate leader and the two men behind him collapsed like air dolls that had sprung a leak.

Spence stared at the four bodies splayed on the deck.

“What the hell just happened?”

“A two-man sniper team with sound-suppressed weapons took them out. In a real attack, the sniper team next would have gone after the man in the boat before he could get away or send a message to his friends. We would continue safely on our way, the ship effectively sanitized.”

“Sanitized?” Spence said.

Hayes nodded. “The bodies would disappear. Word would get around pirate circles that it is unlucky to attack your ships. We’ve even thought about putting a decal of some sort on the hull to warn that a ship is ‘pirate proof.’ Maybe a skull and crossbones inside a circle with a crossbar.”

Spence studied Cal’s face. “You’re not being facetious,” he said.

“Not at all. We do whatever is in the best interests of our clients.”

“By putting a gang of hired killers aboard their ships? Making bodies disappear?”

Hayes said, “My company is sensitive to the reputation of its clients. But the alternative is losing ships and cargo.”

“That’s why we pay the big insurance premiums, to cover our losses from these ragged-assed bastards. Ships and cargo are expendable.”

“What about officers and crew?”

“Like I said, expendable.”

Hayes pondered the answer. “I understand you built your company from scratch.”

“Damn right! Started with one old rust-bucket bought at auction and turned it into an international fleet of top-notch vessels. What’s that got to do with anything?”

Hayes smiled. He was ready to close the deal.

“I don’t see you letting a bunch of ragged-assed bastards take your hard-earned ships without a fight. Tell you what. Let’s put a team on one of your ships. Give it a test. I’ll even foot the bill up front for the safe room. Run the ship through pirate territory. See how things work out. I can have a team anywhere in the world within 48-hours.”

“You think I’m crazy enough to risk one of my ships?”

Hayes said nothing.

“Damned if I’ll have anything to do with cold-blooded murder,” Spence said. He gave his assistant a tight smile and stalked off.

Horton seemed unperturbed. “It’s okay,” he said to Hayes. “He’s just covering his rear end. He wants to make a deal. What’s it going to cost us?”

“The cost varies according to the size of the ship and the team. On a bigger ship you might want to have four snipers.” He threw out a couple of figures. “I’ll throw the hull decal in for free.”

They dickered over price for a few minutes before reaching an agreement, and Horton left the bridge to find his boss. Hayes made a quick phone call to alert his home office in Bethesda that he’d secured another deal.

Business was good. Every time a pirate incident hit the headlines, he gained a client. The ragged-assed bastards had made it possible for Hayes to afford his eight-hundred-dollar suit, two-hundred-mile-per-hour Bentley Cabrio, and fast boat.

He was reaching for a microphone to tell the captain to come back to the bridge when his phone chirped. When he answered it, the voice at the other end said, “You still make the best gumbo in Louisiana, Cal?”

He brushed back non-existent hair from his shaved scalp. “Damn. Is that you, Hawk?”

“In the flesh. Maybe a little more of it around the middle than when you last saw me. How long has it been? Four years?”

“Give or take a day or two.”

The call triggered a reverse switch in Cal’s brain and he flashed back to a white light and loud explosion and broken men lying on the ground. He’d been deafened by the blast, but he could see their soundless screams. He swallowed hard.

“I still get flashbacks, Hawk.”

“Me too. Memory is a wonderful thing. I’ve heard there’s a pill that can wipe the brain clean of bad recollections.”

“I wouldn’t want to wipe out all my memories. We had some good times, man.”

“That we did. How’s business?”

“Can’t complain. I’ve got job security as long as there are bad guys out there. Drive a hot car. Live in a trophy house. Alone, unfortunately. My wife gets the big alimony payments.” He paused. “I owe everything to you, Hawk. You took the hit for me.”

Hawkins chuckled softly. “My act of heroism was entirely involuntary, Cal. I didn’t go out of my way to set off that IED.”

“I didn’t get your back, man.”

“That’s because you were standing beside me.”

“Not talking about the ambush. Later. When the navy came down on you. SEALs never leave a guy behind. I let the navy chew you up and spit you out. I owe you big time.”

“You may be sorry you said that once you hear my proposition.”

He outlined the main points of the Afghan treasure hunt and waited for Hayes to comment, which he did after a moment’s pause.

“You know something, Hawk, that is the dumbest mission I have ever heard of.”

“I agree. I wouldn’t take offense if you told me you had better things to do.”

“That’s not what I’m telling you.”

“You’re saying you’re in?”

“I’m in,” Hayes said. “I’ve got a great management staff to watch the shop. There’s one other thing.”

“What’s that?” Hawkins said.

“I never answered your question. I still make a hell of a gumbo.”

The setting sun was a molten ball of orange hanging over the shimmering waters of Cape Cod Bay as the executive jet made its approach to Otis air base, but the beauty of the scene was lost on Hawkins. Nearly twenty-four hours had elapsed since he’d told Fletcher he’d have a team in place.

Two down and one to go.

As he drove back to Woods Hole from Otis, he thought about his whirlwind trip to Washington. Abby and Calvin had been easier to snag than Hawkins had expected. The next call might be the most difficult, and risky.

Returning home, he fed Quisset, and then climbed to his study, sat at his desk, stared at the computer screen, and thought about his first meeting with the enigmatic Molly Sutherland.

Hawkins had refused to stop pushing for an investigation into the ambush that had nearly killed him and he’d been ordered to see a navy psychiatrist. He had limped into the waiting room of a navy medical building in Bethesda and flopped into a chair. Sitting opposite him was a young woman in her twenties, wearing army khakis, who was tapping away at a laptop computer. She was slightly plump, with a creamy white complexion and a round, pretty face framed by short black hair.

She looked up and blinked through black-framed round glasses at Hawkins with the most beautiful orchid blue eyes he had ever seen. He nodded and gave her a half smile. She gazed at him with a neutral expression, and then returned to her computer. He thumbed through an old dog-eared copy of Guns and Ammo magazine. He was pondering the idea of walking away from his appointment when the young woman spoke.

“He’s a snake, you know.”

Hawkins looked up from his magazine. “Pardon me?”

She jerked her head toward a closed door. “Dr. Mengele.”

Hawkins wanted to ask the woman why she used the name of the Nazi concentration camp doctor, but a door opened and a stern-looking nurse said, “Dr. Trask will see you now, Lieutenant Hawkins.” The nurse handed the woman a clipboard. “The doctor would like you to fill out this paperwork before he sees you, Corporal Sutherland.”

Sutherland smirked at Hawkins. “Have a nice day.”

A minute later, Hawkins was sitting in front of a mahogany desk occupied by the psychiatrist. Dr. Trask was gaunt, almost cadaverous, in appearance, with a weak chin that was diminished even further by his long face. He picked up a folder and let it drop onto the desk top.

“I’ve gone through your records,” he said. “Disturbing.”

“You’ve done a psychiatric evaluation without talking to me?” Hawkins said.

Dr. Trask stiffened at the unexpected retort. He was used to patients cowering at his pronunciations from on high.

“I didn’t have to talk to you. It’s obvious from the statements of your superiors that you have paranoid delusions. You think someone is out to get you.”

“That’s not the way I look at it. I just want the Navy to investigate the circumstances of a military operation I was involved in.”

Trask leaned his elbows on the desk and folded his hands in front of him. He gazed at Hawkins with slate-colored eyes. “The ambush that injured you, and resulted in the deaths of three men under your command, is making you feel inadequate and less of a man.”

Hawkins had the urge to rip the man’s face off with his bare hands, but he knew that the doctor was deliberately trying to prod him into making an unwise move that would support his diagnosis. He remembered the warning of Corporal Sutherland.

He’s a snake, you know.

Hawkins sat back in his chair and folded his hands in imitation of the doctor.

“We can save a lot of time if you dispense with the psychobabble and get right to the point, Dr. Trask.”

Trask’s eyes narrowed, giving his face a predatory look.

“Very well, lieutenant. I’m sure you understand your situation. Your hostile attitude gives me no choice but to recommend a psychiatric discharge unless you stop your private vendetta against the Navy.”

Hawkins understood the situation very well. Trask was a snake, but the real reptiles were the higher-ups blocking a probe.

“Thank you very much for being honest with me,” Hawkins said. “I’ll certainly give your warning serious consideration.”

He pushed himself out of his chair and headed for the door. As he walked through the lobby he saw Corporal Sutherland look up at him with questioning eyes.

“You were right,” he said. “Good luck.”

She folded her laptop. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got snake repellant.”

Hawkins was tempted to go the nearest bar and numb his brain with booze, but he waited outside for Corporal Sutherland. She emerged after less than ten minutes.

“That didn’t take long. How’d you make out?” he asked.

“Medical discharge. At least it wasn’t a psychiatric one like yours.”

“How’d you know about that?”

“Dr. Mengele threatened me with the same thing, but held off after I used my repellant.”

Hawkins grinned in spite of himself. “I could use some of that stuff myself. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

She cocked her head and looked at him, thinking, then said, “There’s a Starbucks a couple of blocks from here.”

They found a table at the back of the coffee shop. Sutherland sipped at a caramel latte coffee and watched Hawkins’ face as he read the report on her computer. It had been prepared by a professional board investigating charges that Trask had a number of improper relationships with his female patients in private practice. The report recommended that his license to practice be revoked.

Hawkins studied the report. “It doesn’t surprise me that he’s a sleaze. Where did you get this stuff?”

“It’s easy when you know how,” she said with a smile. “Watch.”

She tapped the computer keys and Hawkins saw his name on the screen. She scrolled down through several navy documents, going back to his SEAL training, and hospital records detailing his injuries.

“Hell,” he said, not entirely pleased to see how easily details of his life could be accessed by a complete stranger. “You got all this from my last name?

“And navy rank. Didn’t intend to pry, but I’m careful about who I go out to coffee with. You and I have a lot in common.”

“I’d like to hear about it,” he said.

She told him she was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. Her full name was Molly Sutherland Suggs. Her father had named her Molly after country singer Molly O’Day. Her mother liked film actor Donald Sutherland. Molly dropped her last name because she didn’t like the way it sounded. Too hissy.

She joined the army at a young age to escape her family’s cycle of poverty, received computer training and excelled at it. The army became her new family. She made corporal and was sent to Iraq. She was ambushed in the barracks and sexually assaulted by her fellow soldiers, but the army hushed up the incident and, like Matt, she was sent to counseling and threatened with a psychiatric discharge when she refused to stay silent.

“What happened to the guys who assaulted you?” he said.

“Nothing.” She gave him an evil smile. “Officially, that is. I took care of it though.”

“What do you mean? Took care of it.”

“I got into their personnel files and inserted homosexual incidents and child pornography into their records. They’re toast for the rest of their lives. Jobs. Marriages. Military service. Down the drain. One of them committed suicide.”

That had been years ago, but as he sat in his study, Hawkins still remembered the dead emotionless tone of her voice and the calmness in the purple-blue eyes. He decided that something had died inside the young woman when she was attacked and pushed out of the army.

It was the only time she talked about her past. And it was the only time he had ever seen her in person. Sutherland still dropped him an email from time to time. She said nothing about what she was doing, or where she lived, and he didn’t inquire. He assumed she was living on a navy disability, with her computer her only companion — a lone computer genius with a mental problem.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, he assured himself.

He took a deep breath, called up Sutherland’s address and typed:

He had barely hit the Send key when the reply appeared.

Hawkins had to think of an answer.

Hawkins typed a summary of the expedition, starting with the call to go to Newport. He included the part about his demands for an honorable discharge. At the end of the summary he wrote:

He waited for her to complete the sentence, and when she didn’t respond he typed:

A photo flashed on the screen of Sutherland in her army uniform. A second later she signed off and the picture disappeared. Hawkins felt a moment of exhilaration. His team was complete. He had the best people he knew in logistics, security and intelligence. Oddballs every one of them, but the best.

Then reality hit home. Oh yeah, he thought. This merry crew is led by a man who is certifiably insane.

He let out a groan that woke Quisset out of a sound sleep.

“We’re doomed,” Hawkins said.

The next day, Hawkins and Snowy wrapped Fido in padding to prepare the submersible for travel. Later that day, a truck arrived in Woods Hole courtesy of the same special number he had called to request a jet to Washington. They watched as Fido was removed from Hawkins’ workshop. As the truck drove off to Otis air base, Hawkins turned to his friend and said, “You’re probably wondering what that was all about.”

“Some.”

“Don’t blame you. I’m going to be gone for a while to work on a project. Leaving early tomorrow morning. Navy stuff, so I can’t tell you the details. Or how long. I wondered if you’d pick Quisset up tomorrow and take care of her while I’m away.”

“Glad to, Matt.”

Hawkins shook Snowy’s hand and then he and Quisset walked back into the house. He packed a bag full of clothes and another with dive gear. Then he climbed to his study and spread out some satellite photos he’d asked a geologist to prepare. Using a magnifying glass, he studied the lake and a lush-looking section of farmland that surrounded a village. He was surprised to see an airstrip.

He spent the next few hours laying out an action plan that covered every eventuality he could think of. He took a quick dinner break and precisely at eight o’clock he called up the video conferencing link on his computer. A Cheshire cat flashed onto the screen, fading until only its enigmatic smile remained. The crescent of pointed teeth morphed into Molly’s Mona Lisa smile and her full face materialized.

One never knew what to expect of Molly.

“What’s with the cat?” he said.

“Virtual kitty. No feeding. No litter box.”

Hawkins knew that was as far as he was going to get with the enigmatic computer genius.

“Are we all set up for the teleconference?”

Sutherland nodded slightly. Her head shrunk on the screen and moved to one side to allow space for Hawkins’ face, then the screen split into quarters and Abby and Calvin appeared like a couple of CNN talking heads. Hayes hadn’t changed much. The wide mouth was stretched in a grin.

“Hawk! You are looking good, man,” Hayes said in his soft-spoken New Orleans drawl. “You too, Abby.”

“Thank you, Cal,” she said. “It’s nice to see you. Thanks for arranging this reunion, Matt.”

She flashed Hawkins the smile that used to get his pulse racing.

“My pleasure. I’d like to introduce you to my friend Molly Sutherland.”

They both said hello, and Abby added, “How come we’ve never heard of you, Molly?”

“Because that’s the way I prefer it,” Molly said. “I like to be in the background.”

Abby cocked her head. “If that’s the case, how did you and Matt meet?”

“Fate,” Sutherland said.

Abby’s eyes narrowed. Matt saw a further question poised on his ex-wife’s lips. He knew first hand about Abby’s persistence and Sutherland’s manic defense of her privacy and broke up the exchange before it started.

“I’ll start by reviewing my own work over the last twenty-four hours.”

He described their objective and outlined his plans. Get in undetected. Use the submersible to speed up the search for underwater caves. Dive into the lake. Find the treasure. Escape.

“Molly, could you give us an overview of what you’ve done?”

Sutherland looked pleased to be the first called upon. Her mouth turned up slightly at the corners.

“I’m putting together the comprehensive historic file on Prester John that you asked for and catalogued the data so it can be accessed forensically according to specific questions. I’ve also established a file on any mention of Prester John anywhere in the world in the last six months. I’ll be combing that file to see if I can find anything relating to the mission.”

“That will be a big help, Molly.”

“Now to mission protection,” she said. “I’ll mine the internet for any hint that the mission has been compromised. I’ve established a surveillance program to keep an eye on internet traffic. If anyone is talking about us in conjunction with Prester John it will trigger a red flag.”

“That sounds like a miniature version of the NSA,” Abby said.

“The program is patterned after the NSA forensic search logarithms. And it’s not miniature. It’s a full blown data mining operation that samples all possible sources.”

The quick shake of Abby’s head signaled her skepticism. “That would take enormous capacity. You must have a room full of computers.”

“I don’t need a room. I sneak into other peoples’ rooms and borrow their computer capacity.”

Hawkins was enjoying Molly’s smack-down of his hard-charging ex-wife, but he wisely kept his thoughts to himself. “Thanks, Molly. That’s exactly what I had in mind. Abby?”

Abby would have liked to have learned more about Sutherland, but she got right down to business.

“My assignment was to get everyone and everything into Afghanistan without going through official channels. A charter air service my company uses will transport personnel and gear directly into Kabul. We board six o’clock tomorrow morning at Dulles. A civilian security contractor will do the in-country insertion and the extraction. Everything will be ready to go within the window of opportunity you specified.” She said to Hayes, “Cal, what sort of load can we expect?”

Hayes looked as happy as a kid reciting his Christmas wish list. “I’ve ordered up a couple of sets of desert cammo dress uniforms,” he said. “We’ll be carrying CAR-15s,” he added, referring to the compact version of the M-16 with the folding stock and the shortened barrel. “For side arms, I know you like the Sig Sauer 9 mm, Matt.” He went down a list that included extra ammunition, a GPS, satellite phone, rations, first aid and survival items. “I’ve stuck in an M-203 for good luck, Matt.”

The M-203 was an aluminum tube with a breech that could hurl an explosive round roughly the size of two golf balls several hundred yards.

“I’m all for good luck,” Matt said. “But strictly speaking, this is not a military mission.”

“Hell, Hawk, I know that. But what are you going to do if you run into some bad guys, throw a rabbit’s foot at them?”

Calvin had a good point. “You can keep your little bean-shooter. You didn’t mention what we’re going to use to carry all that stuff.”

“Saving the best for last. I’ll have a DPV with extra fixings waiting for us at the airport.”

The Desert Patrol Vehicle was a dune buggy on hormones with a 200-horsepower Volkswagen engine that could kick it up to a speed of ninety miles per hour.

“Sounds like you covered all the bases, Cal. Anyone have comments?”

Abby had followed the discussion closely. “One adjustment. I’d like you to order up a third line of gear. I wear a size six.”

Hawkins shook his head. “I thought you’d only go as far as Kabul, Abby.”

“I said I wanted to follow through on the logistical support.”

“Damnit, Abby, why do you have to be so difficult? This isn’t exactly a stroll in the park we’re talking about.”

Hawkins knew he’d said the wrong thing the second he said it. Abby’s eyes narrowed. She reminded him that she had trained in covert operations and survival techniques at Annapolis, and that she was an expert marksman and an experienced diver.

“All true, Abby, but you forget that I’m in charge of this mission.”

“And you forget who’s organizing it. Besides, I still outrank you.”

It was an unkind cut, and one Hawkins had experienced before, but he didn’t rise to the bait.

“We’ll have more time to talk about this on the flight to Afghanistan,” Hawkins said, although he could tell from the stubborn tilt of Abby’s chin that there would be no yielding on her part. “Cal, pack a third set of gear for the lady, just in case.”

“See you in Washington in the morning,” Abby said, setting her lips in a tight smile.

She disconnected from the teleconference. Hawkins told the other two he would send them a summary of his plans. Their pictures faded and Hawkins shut down the teleconference. He tented his fingers, thinking, then turned back to the photos on his desk and sketched out the action plan that had been bouncing around in his head. As he worked, he heard a distant rumbling. A thunderstorm was moving in.

The storm clouds had been stacking up in the west all afternoon, even before the executive jet touched down at Barnstable Municipal Airport in Hyannis. Two passengers had gotten off the plane. They wore the standard tourist outfit: shorts, sneakers, high white socks and Hawaiian-shirts. The baseball caps pulled down over their platinum-hued hair and sun-glasses shading their intense blue eyes made it practically impossible to detect the fact that they were identical twins.

Instead of bathing suits and sun tan lotion, each man carried a Finnish-made Jatimatic machine gun and extra ammo magazines in his travel bag. The compact automatic weapon weighed slightly more than four pounds and was designed for close combat. They threw the bags in the back seat of their rental car. The pilot was told they would return in a few hours and instructed to keep his cell phone on.

Forty-five minutes later Mihovil Marzak drove the car along Water Street past the brick buildings of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His brother Mirko kept an eye on the GPS and map. Not a word passed between them, but they functioned like two pistons in a twin-cylinder engine.

The Marzaks were Serbian by birth and had come of age during the Bosnian war. As teenagers they had been recruited into the army by their father, an army officer under Ratko Mladic, and instructed in the art of wholesale homicide during the Sbrenica massacre. Until silenced by a NATO bomb, the elder Marzak bragged about the military prowess of his young sons, particularly Mirko, the eldest of the twins by three minutes. The age difference had created an unusual dynamic. Mirko was impulsive, almost rash, and he considered murder both his job and his hobby. Mihovil was equally as deadly, but more contemplative, a reader of poetry.

Despite the personality difference, they worked smoothly together as an efficient killing machine. After they left Bosnia, they capitalized on their skill at inflicting mass casualties, working as killers for hire until Mihovil suggested that they form a firm of their own, Gemini, which specialized in high body counts. For Gemini, a single assassination like this night’s assignment was like stepping on an ant.

At a word from his brother, Mihovil turned onto a residential street and drove past a two-story Victorian style house. The name on the mailbox was Hawkins. A red pick-up truck was parked in the driveway. He turned around and went by the house again, picking a good spot for a stake-out. Then he and his brother drove around the village sizing up escape routes.

The first drops of rain from the fast-moving storm began to splat against the van’s windshield. Thunder rolled in the distance and the rainfall became heavier. The inclement weather sent tourists scurrying for cover, but the twins agreed without saying that the storm was a happy coincidence. The atmospheric fireworks would cover the noise of their work.

They parked diagonally across the street from the Victorian house. A light glowed in the second floor picture window. When the lightning and thunder were at their fiercest, they got out of the car, walked quickly through the slanting rain to the front porch and climbed the steps, tensing when they saw a dark shape approach. Quisset had heard the visitors and came through the doggy door to say hello, his tail wagging.

Mirko pulled a telescoping steel spring baton from his jacket pocket.

“Come here, puppy,” he said, his lips curved in a friendly smile.

“No,” his brother warned. Attacking the dog was not part of his carefully-laid plan.

It was too late. There was a metallic blur, a wet thump, and the dog crumpled to the ground.

Hawkins looked up from his work, wondering where Quisset was. He guessed that his dog was hiding under a bed with her paws over her head. The kettle drum atmospherics had grown louder as the thunder storm crept spider-like across Vineyard Sound on long jagged legs of pure electricity. Flashes of lightning reflected eerily off the diving helmets and a drumbeat of raindrops thrummed the rooftop.

Hawkins had been working under an adjustable halogen desk lamp that cast a puddle of light around the desk. The rest of the study was in shadow. When the lightning flashed again, Hawkins glanced up instinctively and saw the otherworldly blue light illuminate the pale faces and hair of two men, one on either side of the door.

Each man held a short-barreled weapon in his hand.

The room went completely dark again, but the image engraved itself in the retinas of Hawkins’ eyes. He dove for the floor and crouched behind his desk.

White-hot flowers blossomed from one gun muzzle, then the other. The thunder that followed the lightning merged with that of the bullets as they ripped into the thick wood of the desk and shot the lamp out. The computer monitor exploded in the hail of hot lead.

The gunfire stopped suddenly.

Hawkins figured the intruders were waiting for him to make a move. He thought of throwing his overturned chair off to the side as a diversion, but it would only buy him a second or two. He still had to get to the door between the gunmen.

The old wooden floor creaked. They were moving in on both sides.

He tensed every muscle in his body and prepared to vault over the desk. He thought he could maybe grab a weapon from one of the attackers, although he knew it was a frail hope. He gulped in a lungful of air and coiled his legs. A desperate plan popped into his head. Luckily there was a lull in the thunder.

He yelled, “Beer!”

He heard the sudden hum of his motorized beer cooler. He imagined the robotic diver plodding across the room like a miniature walking jukebox. There was an ear-shattering rattle of gunfire and the study was lit up by a stroboscopic effect from the muzzle flashes.

Hawkins reached a hand over the top of his desk and groped among the fragments of glass, plastic and metal. The shards cut his fingers, but he ignored the pain. His clawing hand closed on the scabbard of the Siebe-Gorman anti-magnetic knife he used as a letter opener. He pulled the scabbard off the desktop, slipped the knife out and held the tip of the blade in a pinching grip. He pushed himself up with his free hand and sprang ungracefully to his feet, snapping off the knife in a stiff-wrist throw aimed above the nearest muzzle flash.

There was as scream of pain and a gun went silent. Then a single gun began to fire. The aim was high, and the spray of bullets struck the display case. Hawkins was belly-down, hands over his head. Bullets ricocheted off the helmets in showers of sparks and the picture window disintegrated.

The firing stopped. Hawkins heard the click of a hammer on an empty chamber and then came the clink of the spent clip hitting the floor.

Hawkins was already sprinting, bent over at the waist, toward the shattered window.

He heard the racking sound of a full magazine.

He dove through the window frame head-first, leaping high to avoid the jagged points of glass. He landed on the porch roof, arms extended, and did a tumbler’s roll that absorbed some of the shock of his body hitting the shingles.

He almost rolled right off the roof, but managed to twist around and grab onto the gutter, ignoring the pain in his lacerated palms. He hung there for a moment, then he dropped off onto the grass near the porch steps. Light streamed from the first-floor window and he saw a dark object on the porch. He climbed the porch stairs and discovered Quisset.

The dog’s head was sticky with blood. He lifted Quisset in his arms and lurched toward the pick-up truck. He grabbed the spare set of keys he kept under the seat and started the engine. As he was backing out of the driveway, he saw movement on the front porch. A figure silhouetted in the window light dragged something out of the house, down the stairs and across the lawn, moving in the direction of a side street.

Hawkins put the truck into low gear and nailed the accelerator so hard that the spinning wheels dug a trench in the crushed shell driveway.

Minutes later he parked in front of a sign that said Emergency Veterinary services. He carried Quisset inside and told the veterinarian on duty that she had wandered off during the storm and been struck in a hit and run accident.

The vet X-rayed Quisset and said, “She’s going to need surgery. There appear to be some bone fragments that could affect her cerebral cortex. We’ll just have to see after we take a look. There’s no guarantee Quisset will recover. She’s hurt pretty bad.”

Hawkins towered over the vet, but his voice was soft-spoken as he said, “Quisset and I have been through some tough times together. I’d appreciate anything you can do, including surgery.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“That’s good enough for me. Here’s my problem, Doc. In about an hour I’ve got to catch a plane. I’m going to be away an indefinite time. I will sign any papers you need to go ahead with the surgery, and I will give you the name of someone who will be in touch with me if you have to put her to sleep.”

Without waiting for an answer, Hawkins gave the vet a business card along with Snowy’s name and number. He left a credit card. The doctor bent to go over the information and when he looked up again, Hawkins was gone.

Mirko Marzak, the man who had slugged the friendly retriever with the steel baton, was beyond medical care.

Hawkins’ aim had been true. The sharp blade of the dive knife had penetrated Mirko’s rib cage as neatly as a dart thrown at a target board. Mihovil had rolled his twin’s warm corpse in a rug and stuffed it into the trunk of his car. Although he was anxious to get out of town, he drove with amazing control, keeping his speed exactly at the legal limit.

His brother’s attack on the dog should have telegraphed Mirko’s impatience and it was not surprising that he had detoured from the plan a second time, with fatal consequences. The plan had been to take Hawkins away from his house to a remote location where he could be killed and his body disposed of. But when the lightning flashed and Hawkins looked up, Mirko had started shooting, and Mihovil had to join in.

He had been puzzled at the sudden call for beer, more so at the deadly diversion when the mechanical thing hummed to life. Hawkins had reacted in an instant, altering the equation. Now he would have to follow suit, coming up with a plan to deal with his altered circumstances.

His first task was to get rid of the body in the trunk. He drove toward the Cape Cod Canal and turned onto a highway that paralleled the wide waterway. A number of turn-offs and parking lots offered access to the canal, and he chose a narrow dirt road and drove to the end. He pulled the knife from his brother’s chest, then hauled the body from the car, removed everything from the pockets, dragged the corpse over the stone revetment that sloped down to the water, and threw his brother’s body in to be carried away by the fast-moving current. The rug and knife splashed into the canal a second later.

Back in the car, he drove back onto the main road and headed to the airport. On the way he placed a call on his cell phone.

“The mission has failed,” he said.

“What happened?” responded the computer-altered voice.

“My brother was killed. Hawkins was more than expected.”

“And what does that make you?” the gravel voice said, dripping with sardonic contempt that even the computer couldn’t disguise.

“We should have been warned that Hawkins was dangerous.”

“You should have acted like highly-paid professionals instead of like amateurs. Every adversary should be considered dangerous. Not every person you encounter will let you kill them.”

The voice was right. He and his brother had been sloppy.

“What do you want me to do?”

“You must dispose of all the evidence.”

“I’ve started that process.”

“Good. As soon as you do that, proceed as planned.”

“Even without my brother?”

“It seems that he was not much help when he was alive,” the voice said.

“I can handle it alone,” Marzak said. “I have a score to settle with Hawkins when I see him again.”

“That’s not likely. Forget Hawkins. You’ve had your chance. I already have a backup plan in place.”

“What—?”

The line went dead.

Marzak muttered an oath, then punched out another number on his phone. A man answered. “Yes.”

“This is Gemini jewelers,” Marzak said. “I designed the necklace for your wife.”

“We’ve been expecting your call.”

“Sorry. I had a last minute job. I have some questions regarding the clasp. I would like to discuss them in person with you.”

“Never mind the necklace for now. We’re more interested in the estate items we talked about. We’ve learned that there is another buyer interested in the collection. When can we get together?”

“I can leave as soon as you make arrangements.”

Pause. “I’ll get back to you.”

Marzak called the chartered jet pilot and said he would be at the airport in ten minutes.

As he drove along, he reminisced about Mirko. He and his brother had operated as a single organism, bringing death and misery to hundreds of people since going into the business of mass murder. The killing of his brother was not only a personal affront, it was an insult to his professionalism. And if word of their carelessness got out, it would be bad for business.

It could have been worse. He and his brother had put the final touches on the Prophet’s Necklace plan only days before. They had been working for months on the scheme. Finding a source of sarin had been the most difficult part, and transporting the deadly poison into the U.S. almost as hard. It had given them time, though, to design the dirty bombs that would spread the toxin and figure out where and how to place them.

They had placed the bombs in six major cities stretching across the country from New York to San Francisco. Each city was a jewel in the necklace. They had picked subways, shopping malls, municipal buildings and other close quarters frequented by many people, where the effects of the toxin would be maximized. When the word was given, they would trigger the bombs remotely, one at a time as the sun moved across the country, building a wave of terror and confusion.

The whole thing depended on him now. As he considered the avalanche of challenges that would come down on him as the result of his brother’s death, he could feel the growing rage in his chest. Hawkins. He was angry at his brother for not following the plan. They had underestimated the man, thinking that the 2–1 advantage and the element of surprise would doom their target.

He looked to his right. Like a phantom that is sometimes conjured up by the brain to replace a missing arm, he saw his brother sitting next to him.

The figure he saw in his fevered imagination had substance and sound.

“We’ll know what to expect the next time around,” the phantom said with a smile on its pale face.

Marzak nodded in agreement. He thought of a quote from his favorite poet, William Blake, who had said it was better to murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire.

Marzak had murdered infants in their cradles as part of his job, and he had no intention of nursing his desire for revenge, no matter what the computer altered voice had told him about his new assignment.

Marzak would make sure he and Hawkins met again. And when they did, Hawkins would be a dead man.

Terrance Aloysius Murphy probably wouldn’t have set out to kill someone that morning if he hadn’t happened to do some personal banking on his Blackberry just before the call from the States came in with the offer of a big money job.

Although the holdings in his Swiss bank accounts were in the seven figures, Murphy figured that with his transfer home looming he was going to have to do something soon to fill the hole that his losing investments in Florida real estate had dug in the original amount.

Murphy was the leader of a two-man team from the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Kabul Country Office Strike Force. After the call, he had hastily pulled the operation together, saying he had a tip that a drug kingpin suspected of Taliban connections was about to leave town.

The target was already on the hit list, waiting for a go-ahead from Murphy. He had compiled the intel on the compound in preparation for a raid, but he had always managed to divert the DEA’s attention to more promising targets.

The DEA agents and a unit of Marines that included a drug-detection dog and his handler joined up with a six-man team of heavily-armed agents from the Counter Narcotics Police of Afghanistan.

The DEA agents were part of a F.A.S.T team, government shorthand for Foreign Deployed Assistance and Support. With sixty percent of heroin profits going to support the Taliban, and a government riddled with drug-related corruption, the DEA had tried going after poppy growers, but that only angered the farmers and didn’t stop the heroin trade. So the agency had begun to interdict the heroin traffickers using para-military agents like Murphy.

The raiding party set out from the forward patrol base before dawn and took up positions near the compound the drug commander used as his headquarters. The intel file contained the exact lay-out of the compound. Informants had infiltrated the enclosure and identified the placement of IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, buried around the perimeter. Assuming that the booby traps would stop any intruder, the drug traffickers had grown complacent and no one was guarding the gate.

Murphy lay on his belly behind a low ridge. He was still brooding about his diminishing cash cache when someone tapped him on the shoulder. It was the platoon sergeant, a twenty-six-year-old Texas kid named Chavez.

“Five minute warning,” Chavez whispered.

Murphy reached down to the speed holster at his waist and tapped the butt of his Smith and Wesson compact 9 mm. Then he wrapped his fingers around the pistol grip of his Benelli M3 shotgun, making sure the lever was in semi-automatic position.

A pencil-thin beam of red light sliced the darkness.

The Afghan commander had given the signal for the attack. Answering blinks came from the Marines spread out around the compound. The Afghans crawled like crabs over the ridge, then ran, crouched-over, toward the gate. The DEA agents and the dog and handler were behind the Afghan agents. The Marines moved in to establish a cordon around the compound.

The Afghan agents forced the front door of the main building. Shouts could be heard in Pashto, ordering someone to surrender. Moments later the Afghans prodded a short bearded man out of the house. The leader of the Afghan narcs came over to Murphy, frowning like a big-game hunter who had only bagged a rabbit.

“This man says he’s only a caretaker. The one we are looking for isn’t here. Only a few women and children.”

“Keep an eye on the old guy and we’ll check out the house,” Murphy said.

The commander turned the job of room-to-room search over to the DEA and the Marine canine team, who went in first with Murphy and his teammate right behind them. They cleared the building without incident except for some screams as they entered the main living space where some women and children were huddled.

Murphy called the Afghan commander on his hand radio. Moments later, the commander appeared with a couple of police who spoke to the women and herded them into a room that had already been secured. The dog, a German shepherd, strained at his leash, pulling his handler toward a door off the main room. The dog sniffed loudly along the bottom of the door. His tail wagged with excitement.

Murphy kicked the door in, leveraging all the strength in his six-foot-three frame. He followed the leveled barrel of his shotgun into the room and found it unoccupied. The dog plunged ahead, dashing toward a pile of cloth bags. A quick swipe from Murphy’s knife showed that the bags contained heroin. Other bags held hundreds of pounds of hashish.

Another door led from the room to an opium lab, where he found evidence that IEDs were assembled in the same space, linking the kingpin to the Taliban.

A voice crackled over the radio. The Marines had spotted someone trying to escape from the compound and were chasing after him. Murphy told his teammate and the Afghan commander to help the Marines, that he’d stay with the detained caretaker.

When he was alone with the old man, he spoke to him in Pashto.

“Who are they chasing, Abe?” he said.

The man, who had been hunched over, straightened to his full height and a crooked grin came to his lips. “I ordered my caretaker to escape, knowing he would run into your Marines.”

“Pretty smart, Abe. What isn’t smart is the fact that you’ve been lying to me about your operation.”

“I wouldn’t cheat you. I’ve been sending your cut of every shipment.”

“You’ve been shaving the payments,” Murphy said. “That’s not holding up your end of the agreement.”

“Maybe, but I’m not the only one who has failed to keep his word. You were supposed to warn me of the raid.”

“And you were supposed to keep your operation out of politics. No support for the insurgents.”

“I have to pay them a little to keep the operation going. Not much.”

“Not talking about the baksheesh. You’re making IEDs, and that makes you Taliban, instead of a plain old drug lord.”

The grin vanished. “I was forced—”

“Not buying it,” Murphy said in English. “I saw your boom-boom lab. You’re one of the bad guys. Those Marines out chasing your man have been hit hard by your little surprise packages.”

“No one in Afghanistan has clean hands. Not even you. If I’m arrested, I will have to tell them about our arrangement all these years.”

“That’s why I’m not going to arrest you. I’m going to let you go.”

“You won’t regret this,” Abe said, a sly look in his eyes.

Murphy waited until Abe was heading for the shadows before he squeezed the trigger of his shotgun. The pellet blast caught the fleeing man dead center in the back. His arms flew in the air and he pitched forward onto the ground face first.

“I know I won’t,” Murphy said.

He went off to rejoin the rest of the strike force and encountered them escorting the terrified caretaker back to the compound. He explained to Chavez and the narc commander that the detainee had tried to get away, but in the dim light, he had misjudged his warning shot.

No one really cared as long as no citizens were killed. They had neutralized a drug and weapons factory and captured a potential informant, all with no casualties. The strike force was in a good mood on the trek back to the patrol base.

A CH-47 helicopter came in and gave the DEA men and the Afghan narcs and their prisoner a ride back to Kabul. A couple of hours after the operation, Murphy was in his apartment showering, washing the desert dust out of his short, straw-colored hair. He wrapped a towel around himself, poured a glass half full of Makers’ Mark whiskey and contemplated the day’s events.

The whole operation and his exchange with Abe had been nothing more than a charade to set up the drug lord’s elimination.

Murphy didn’t care how cozy Abe had been with the Taliban as long as he’d proved a source of revenue. But Abe had been skimming off the take, and Murphy couldn’t let word get around that he could be cheated with impunity. Only thing now was that Abe’s loss would cut off a supply of cash.

No matter. The payment for the job would help his bottom line. And he would easily cultivate another source: Afghanistan produced 90 percent of the world’s opium and exported more heroin than Colombia exported cocaine.

He downed the contents of the glass and turned his attention to the second part of his assignment.

He started up his computer and gazed with hard blue eyes at the photograph of Matt Hawkins on the monitor. The photo had come from the Woods Hole Oceanographic website. The old Hawk had aged pretty well, whereas Murphy’s broad face was weathered and crevassed from the effects of hard living. Even without the booze and women, and the blasting sunlight, the dangerous life of a DEA agent had etched premature age lines around his mouth and eyes. He experienced a rush of resentment. Hell, while he’d been chasing down drug traffickers and insurgents as many as two to three times a week, the Hawk had been leading the small town life. Not that he would ever underestimate Hawkins.

He actually liked Hawkins. He was a ballsy, competent and resourceful bastard. But the same admirable qualities made him dangerous. And now Hawkins was headed back to Afghanistan. It was a no-brainer what he would do when he got there. He would try to find out what happened years before. The trail would have led to Abe, then to Murphy, and eventually to those Swiss bank accounts.

Murphy didn’t need anyone to tell him Hawkins could simply not be allowed to get that far. He would have to stop him again, although this time he would make sure Hawkins was put away for good.

Hawkins stood in the doorway of his darkened study and felt the cool night breeze from the shattered window against his cheeks. The salty air mingled with another, more disturbing smell. He flipped the wall switch and light from the recessed ceiling lamps flooded the room. At his feet was a dark pool of drying blood that had soaked through to the wooden floor. The rug itself was missing.

His hard gaze assessed the damage. The bullet-riddled desk might be patched with a ton of wood putty, but the walking beer cooler that had distracted the twin gunmen had gone to robot heaven. The little figure lay on its back, its bulbous aluminum skin perforated with more holes than a colander.

He walked over to inspect his collection. Shards of glass from the display cabinets crackled under his boots. Dings and dents marred the shiny brass helmets. The main damage was to the book collection on the opposite wall. The cardboard covers and pages littered the floor like confetti.

The soft chime of a wall clock that had miraculously escaped damage told Hawkins he had no time to waste. He picked up the remains of the beer cooler and stored them in a closet. Then he got out a broom and dust pan, scooped glass and paper into a trash barrel, splashed bleach on the blood spot and mopped it up. He hauled the trash down to the basement and wrestled sheets of plywood from his lumber supply up to the study. He nailed the plywood over the window frame, using quick taps to minimize the sound of nocturnal hammering.

It looked like crap, but it would have to do. He’d get Snowy to replace the window glass. He went into the bathroom and washed out the cuts in his hand. As he dabbed the lacerations with antiseptic, he happened to glance in the mirror. No wonder the vet had seemed nervous. He looked like one of those crazed Norse warriors known as berserkers. His hair and beard were competing to see which most resembled a bramble bush.

Hawkins grabbed a pair of scissors and chopped away at his beard until he could finish it off with a straight razor. The prominent chin that emerged was whiter than the rest of his face, but a few days under the Afghan sun would change that.

He took a shower and changed into fresh jeans and shirt. Then he made a quick house survey and dashed out to his truck with duffle in hand. He made good time to Otis air base on the deserted back roads. The jet had already landed. He tucked the truck into a parking space and climbed into the plane’s cabin. The plane was taxiing down the runway for take-off as he buckled himself in.

Quickly gaining altitude, the plane cruised at four hundred miles per hour toward Washington. As the miles flicked by, Hawkins gazed through the window at the sparkling tapestry of cities and towns and tried to slow the thoughts churning around in his head. The would-be killers were not in Woods Hole by mistake. They knew who he was and where he lived. He knew only one reason he’d have a target on his chest.

Someone wanted to torpedo the Prester John mission.

More disturbing was the fact that someone knew about the assignment. So much for hush-hush security.

Borne out of desperation, his aim had been true and he had seen the dive knife strike one of the men in the chest. His eyes grew cold. He had no remorse over the kill. The destruction of property he could brush aside. Attempted murder and attacking a loyal pal like Quisset were not things he could forgive.

He called a number on his cell phone. “This is Hawkins,” he said. “Sorry to bother you, doctor, but I wondered how Quisset was doing.”

“No bother, Mr. Hawkins. I was about to call. They’re wrapping up the surgery as we speak. Your dog will live, but her skull was severely fractured and there may be some motor impairment from the brain damage. She might not be able to function normally. You might want to think of putting her down.”

“Not a chance, Doc.”

“Guess that’s a no. I’d probably do the same thing in your place. We’ll see what we can do to bring your friend up to snuff.”

“Thanks, Doc. Call me as soon as you know for sure.”

The vet started to go into the details of the surgery, but Hawkins had to cut him off. The pilot had announced that the plane was making its approach to Dulles.

The plane bumped down onto the tarmac and taxied past a line of FedEx and UPS cargo jets, stopping finally near a Boeing 747. The words: Global Logistics Technologies were printed in black on the pale blue fuselage. Parked next to the open cargo section of the jumbo jet was the truck that had picked up the submersible and his other gear in Woods Hole.

Hawkins climbed down the gangway to the tarmac and walked over to Abby who was standing near the 747. She was wearing a pale blue jumpsuit that emphasized rather than disguised her feminine curves, and her hair was tucked under a dark blue baseball hat. She noticed that Hawkins had shaved his beard.

“What happened to the chin fuzz?”

“It got caught in a lawn-mower.”

She reached out and stroked his jaw. “I like it. Never went for the werewolf look.” She went back to her iPad. “I was just going over the cargo manifest. We’re in good shape.”

Hawkins swept the long fuselage with his eyes.

“Nice of the President to let us borrow Air Force One.”

“Thought you’d like to travel in style. Global Logistics makes regular cargo runs to Kabul under government contract. I simply tweaked the schedule.”

“Some tweak,” Hawkins said. He was impressed but not surprised.

Abby had honed her talent for precision in the navy. The aircraft carrier she had served on was a moving base crowded with planes and the crews, where the slightest mistake could be fatal.

A cargo crew used a fork lift to load their gear onto a freight platform. Abby watched as the boxes were raised to the open cargo door and turned to Hawkins.

“Where’s Calvin?” she said. “We’re scheduled to take off in thirty minutes.”

Hawkins glanced as his watch. Hayes was running late. He called his friend on his cell phone and asked where he was.

“Hoo-Yah!” Hayes yelled. “ETA is im-mi-nent.”

Two pairs of headlights were approaching. A black Bentley was leading a flat-bed truck across the tarmac. The Bentley stopped next to the plane. Hayes hopped out of the car and waved in the truck, which expertly backed up to the loading platform.

The truck disgorged two men who had physiques like gorillas on steroids.

Hayes directed the unloading with shouts and arm waves. The men rolled the plastic-covered desert vehicle down a ramp at the back of the truck, and pushed it onto the cargo lift. A crew inside the plane took it from there.

Hayes peeled off some bills as payment. As the truck rumbled off, he strode over to Hawkins and Abby who had been watching the fast-moving process with amazement. He gave Hawkins a bear hug.

“Sorry I was late,” Hayes said. “Had to pick up snacks for the trip.” He stroked his chin. “You look different than the last time I saw you, Hawk. More clean-cut. Kinda like the two-toned skin.”

Hawkins was starting to regret having shaved off his beard. “Think of it as natural camouflage.”

Hayes let out a whooping laugh, then trotted over to the Bentley, tucked the car next to a storage shed and threw a protective cover over the top. He grabbed his duffle and joined Hawkins and Abby on the cargo lift. They entered the tunnel-like interior of the plane and walked past the desert vehicle, which had been parked next to stacks of cargo containers.

Abby led the way up a flight of stairs to the big passenger cabin under the fuselage hump. Instead of rows of seats, the cabin had been fitted with comfortable chairs and sofas that could be used as beds. They settled into the seats on either side of a small table. The massive Pratt and Whitney engines cranked into action and after a short warm-up, the plane taxied out onto the runway.

The pilot’s voice came over the speakers, and announced that they had been cleared for take-off. The plane accelerated down the runway and lifted off the tarmac, then climbed to thirty-five thousand feet and headed east at a speed of 565 miles per hour on the route that would take it to Istanbul. With a range of more than seven thousand nautical miles, the jet would need only one fueling stop before heading across Asia to Kabul. The plane would spend around fourteen hours in the air for the seven thousand mile flight.

Hayes volunteered to make breakfast. He pulled some plastic bags out of his duffle and rattled around in the galley. Mouth-watering fragrances soon filled the cabin. Cal served a breakfast gumbo made with potatoes and sausage, and a Cajun omelet folded over crabmeat and rice, all washed down with strong coffee. As they were eating, Abby noticed the bandage on Hawkins’ hand and asked about it.

“Cut myself on some window glass.” Hawkins drained his cup and took in his two breakfast companions. “Thanks for the meal, Cal. And I want to thank the both of you for agreeing to come along on this mission. I couldn’t ask for better back up.”

Hayes stretched his legs out and laced his hands behind his head.

“Hell, Hawk. We should be thanking you. Flying first class on our own jumbo jet. Doesn’t get any better than this.”

“Before you pull out your flower shirt and sandals, I want to warn you that the mission has been compromised.”

He told them about the attempt to kill him, explaining in detail exactly how he had cut his hand on window glass.

“Any idea who these two guys were?” Hayes said.

“Never saw them before. Not even in my nightmares.”

“This is going to complicate things,” Abby said.

“It will definitely make the mission more dangerous. I’m giving you both the option of pulling out. I’ll tell Fletcher there’s been a leak, and tell him to go to Plan B.”

Hayes shook his head. “I’m in it if you are, Hawk.”

“Thanks, Cal. I’m still in as well, but I wish you’d reconsider your decision to go along, Abby.”

Abby arched an eyebrow.

“Do I have to pull rank on you again, Hawkins? I don’t do half-missions.”

Hawkins looked over at Hayes. “Can you talk some sense into her, Cal?”

“The lady’s got rank on me, too, Hawk.”

“Thank you, Calvin,” Abby said with a smug expression.

“But this is a fool’s mission,” Hawkins pressed. “I have my reasons for taking it, reasons that don’t concern you.”

She turned to Hayes. “Calvin, do you think this is a fool’s mission?”

Hayes greeted the question with a guffaw. “Every mission I’ve been on has been dumb-ass,” he said.

“Matt thinks we don’t know that he’s trying to manipulate us with a guilt trip for his own goals. Please tell your friend that we’re onto him. We know that the psycho discharge has eaten away at his brain all these years and that he’s going on a mission with crazy written all over it because he wants to find out why the navy threw him to the wolves.”

“I owe Hawk. I’d go along with anything he asked. I don’t care why he’s doing it.”

“Neither do I. If it makes you feel better, Matt, I have no feelings of guilt whatsoever over our break-up.”

“Happy to hear that, but there is a difference, Abby. You and I were married. Calvin and I were comrades in arms.”

She gave him a stage sigh. “You’ve forgotten that we spent a lot of time in each other’s arms, too.”

Hayes saw where the conversation was heading and scooped up the plates. “I’ll clean up. You can take the lunch shift.”

He disappeared into the galley where he did a fairly good impression of Fats Domino singing Blue Monday, obviously aimed at drowning out the conversation in the main cabin. Hawkins and Abby exchanged glances and they both started laughing.

“Maybe we should put aside the serious stuff,” Hawkins said. “We’re going to have enough to deal with out in the field.”

She flashed him a smile that could have melted an iceberg, leaned forward and kissed him on the lips longer than was necessary.

“You won’t regret this, Matt.”

He felt heat come into his cheeks. Another reason to regret the loss of his beard. He dug a leather portfolio case out of his duffle bag. He riffled through the dossiers until the warm glow faded from his face, and spread out the contents of the folders on a table.

When Hayes rejoined them, Matt said, “We’ve got the insertion and extraction down. I want to go over the dive plan.”

Abby yawned. “Can we put it off until later?”

“Sure,” Hawkins said. “We’ve got a long flight ahead of us.”

“Good.” She grabbed a pillow and blanket from the overhead. “I’m going to take a little nap.”

She stretched out on a row of seats and promptly fell asleep. Hayes yawned and said it must be catching. He camped out on another row and a few minutes later he was snoring.

Hawkins gazed pensively at the sleeping forms. He didn’t like using other people, even if they went along with it. He’d always had the feeling that it was his bad judgment five years ago that had put him in front of the oncoming freight train of a faceless entity. Now the past had caught up with the present, and he didn’t want to make the same mistake again.

He was convinced that the key to his past remained in Afghanistan, where he and his unit had been ambushed. He had done everything right that day five years ago, but somehow he had screwed up. The bomb had smashed his leg and cost the lives of three men.

There had been the hot blinding light and the kaboom and he was flying through the air like a cannonball. When he regained consciousness, he was stone deaf and the whole scene was a silent movie. Some men were staggering to their feet. Others lay lifeless on the bloody ground.

His hearing was almost ninety-nine percent recovered when he appeared before the board of inquiry. He heard every word when the presiding officer went stone-faced and said, “This hearing is at an end.”

“With all due respect sir, I believe there is more to this matter than has been presented.”

“Not as far as this board is concerned. I’d advise you to count your lucky stars, try to forget this incident and get on with your life.”

“Then this is the end of it?

“Correct, Lieutenant Hawkins.”

The board members started to pick up their papers.

“Well it’s not the end of it for me, sir. If the navy doesn’t intend to get to the bottom of this, then I will.”

Hawkins recalled how the guards had moved in closer as if he were a rabid dog. After the board made its escape, he sat alone in the room, alone with his thoughts, full of rage at what had just transpired. It had been a slippery slope from there, leading to the shrink’s office and his discharge.

He could live without having his psych discharge reversed, but he was single-minded in his quest to find out who had shattered his leg and his navy career.

And when he did?

What then, Hawkins? he asked himself. What then?

He had no immediate answer. He knew only that he was going to do everything he could to make this new mission succeed, an outcome that was highly unlikely given the collection of oddballs he had assembled to back him up. The thought reminded him that he had one more thing to do. He reached for his cell phone and punched out Sutherland’s number.

Sutherland lived in a one-story stucco house atop a scrub-covered hill on rolling land that was once part of an abandoned ranch about ten miles north of the Mexican border. The only people she ever saw on her property were illegal immigrants heading north and the border police in white SUVs trying to intercept them. They were the ideal visitors because they didn’t linger.

She had settled in Arizona after wandering around the Southwestern desert vaguely in search of the kind of spirituality that had vanished along with her innocence. Sutherland had seen the listing for the stucco house in a real estate office window during a stopover in the artsy little town of Tubac. She rode out to take a look at the house and immediately fell in love with its isolation and panoramic view. She bought it and about five surrounding acres with her winnings from internet poker. Her navy disability pension kept her in tacos and burritos and paid the utility bills.

The quiet beauty of the desert had lulled the anxieties that seemed to hound her wherever she traveled. Inspired by the fiery vermilion of the sunsets she saw in the western sky from her patio, she had ventured into town and acquired acrylic paints, brushes and an easel in a local art supply shop. After she took a few painting lessons in a local gallery, she had been spending less time at the computer and more of her days in front of a canvas.

She painted landscapes at first. Her paintings were technically well-executed, but they made her uneasy because of what they revealed about her psyche. She didn’t have to be a psychologist to detect the disturbing hints of paranoia in the beastly eyes lurking in the shadows and in the menacing postures of saguaro cacti. She had put her landscapes in storage and switched to another subject, the hummingbirds that darted in to dine at the dozen or so feeders she had hung around the house. It was impossible to instill menace in her paintings of the tiny birds and she captured the luminescent hues of their colors with amazing accuracy.

She had set up her computer in a small bedroom that had a window view of the crumbling walls of an old ranch house and stables in a shallow valley around a quarter of a mile away. She had carried her coffee into her office to check her computer when the call came in from Hawkins.

“We’re on our way, Molly. Crossing the Atlantic. How’s it going?”

“Fine. Prester John file is done. I’m setting up the internet surveillance program, but nothing has come up so far that relates to the mission.”

“Great, Molly.” He paused. “I’ve been thinking. I don’t really have a handle on the folks who hired me.”

“You told me about the Newport meeting.”

“Yes, but those characters could have been bit players for all I know. Dumb not to vet the people at the meeting.”

“Yeah, pretty dumb. No problem. I’ll start files on all the names you gave me.”

“That would put my mind at ease. I’ll let you know when we get to Kabul.”

After they said their good-byes, Sutherland turned to her computer. She compiled bios on the Newport group. Nothing popped up to catch her attention. There was one name on the meeting list that she didn’t check out. Matt Hawkins.

Sutherland already knew everything there was to know about Hawkins. She had opened a file the day she met him in Trask’s office, adding to it every step of his life since he’d left the navy, returned to college and established a new career. She had watched electronically from afar, only rarely corresponding with him. Her fault mostly. She was aware that she had a crush on Hawkins. My god, she thought, what female wouldn’t be attracted to him? Sutherland knew Hawkins liked her, but probably more like a kid sister. She was comfortable with that arrangement, with its implicit bond of trust. It was why she had answered his IM. And the reason she took on this nutty assignment.

Although she had to admit that her heart had skipped a beat when she saw his face during the teleconference, and she was pleased to hear him praise her skill as an investigator. Out of idle curiosity, she called up the Hawkins file and clicked on the transcript of the navy hearing after the ambush in Afghanistan. She read down to the tense exchange between Hawkins and the lead officer:

Sutherland found the rest of the testimony hard to read. The board took turns demolishing Matt’s theory that dark, unknown forces had doomed the operation. Without explicitly saying so, their questions seemed to suggest that it was Matt’s fault the mission went awry. Matt was still feeling guilt about his leadership. The outburst that ended his career and led to a less than honorable discharge was inevitable given his precarious mental state.

She had read the transcript before, but except for her friend’s flashes of anger, it seemed straightforward. Hawkins was on the defensive, visibly frustrated with the board’s unwillingness to look further into the ambush. She sat back in her chair and stared out the window.

Something was out of kilter. In reading the transcript before, she had concentrated on Hawkins and his anguished testimony rather than the facts presented at the hearing. She had the feeling she had missed something.

Sutherland glanced at her wall clock. She had to run into town for art supplies and her painting class. She snapped the cover down on her computer and pushed back from the desk. She’d get back to the hearing later. Maybe a few hours slapping paint on canvas would clear her mind.

The panicked call came in a few hours after Professor Saleem had contacted his cousin to tell him about Hawkins.

“Events are moving faster than I expected,” Mohamed said. “You must come home.”

Saleem was standing in the history department hallway outside his classroom, phone close to his ear, after excusing himself from his pupils.

“Are you mad? I can’t come home. I have classes to teach. What is so important that you must drag me away from my duties to my students?”

“Your duty to your country and the intelligence service you are sworn to obey.”

“I thought I was fulfilling those duties with my service here at the university.”

“Saleem, this is not negotiable!”

The professor had never heard his normally self-possessed cousin on the verge of hysteria.

Saleem asked Mohamed to hold on for a moment and went back into the room to dismiss his class early. When he was alone in his classroom he sat at his desk and said, “I can talk now. Please tell me what has happened. What is your situation like?”

The interlude gave his cousin a chance to settle down. “It is like trying to control a tiger with a leash made of thread. The lure of treasure had diverted our friends as we hoped. I have delayed them to this point with excuses of government bureaucracy. But now they want to move ahead immediately with a mercenary operation to secure the treasure. I can’t help but think it has something to do with Hawkins.”

“You said before that they were not ready to mount an operation,” the professor said. “You said it would take them a while and keep them occupied while we worked on the Grand Plan. That it would keep them from hanging the Prophet’s Necklace around the neck of the United States.”

“True. That was what I thought until I talked to the Doctor and told him about Hawkins. He said he wants to move right away. He also said that the designer of the necklace is a mercenary named Marzak who had been hired to lead the expedition as soon as he finished putting the strands in place. It seems that he is at last free.”

“If this operation slips out of our grasp it would be extremely dangerous,” the professor said, trying to keep alarm from elevating his voice.

“Which is why it isn’t going to happen. Our main goal remains the same. Control of the lithium fields. I want you to go on the operation and keep an eye on Marzak. A plane is flying in from London to pick you up.”

“You forget that my skills are more professorial than operational, cousin.”

“You’ve gone through training the same as the rest of us. Besides, you’re the only one I can trust who can help me hold this thing together.”

“I may need someone to hold me together.”

“Be of good cheer. We may end up with the lithium and the treasure. The Doctor tells me he has summoned Marzak. I’ve arranged for him to be on the same plane as you. I told the Doctor that you will be in operational control of the treasure mission.”

“What? Are you crazy?”

“Not at all. Marzak cannot be wandering about the U.S. We can’t risk having him set something off that will bring the United States more into the region before we make the minerals grab. This development could be to our advantage.”

“Please elucidate, dear cousin.”

“You may be able to glean information about the necklace. Even if you don’t, we can take care of Marzak and at the same time call the American birds in to drop their eggs on the Shadow leadership. Whether the Shadows get the treasure or not, their leaders will assemble to plan strategy and thus be vulnerable.”

“I hope you are right. What about the Hawkins mission?”

“The mercenary force includes formidable air power. The American operation doesn’t stand a chance. They’ll be wiped out along with the drug lord, leaving the field clear for us. In the meantime, don’t let Marzak out of your sight.”

They chatted a few minutes longer, then Saleem hung up. His cousin had a talent for making lemonade when handed lemons, as the Americans said, but as the professor began to pack his suitcase, his thoughts of the future were pervaded by a deep sense of foreboding.

The plane his cousin had arranged for Saleem arrived in Washington to pick up a dozen Pakistani officers on their way back from a training mission with the U. S. Army. As the professor followed the officers onto the plane, he saw the man sitting toward the rear of the cabin.

Fresh from their training in Texas, the chattering officers hardly paid any attention to the man who had a baseball cap pulled down on his head and wore aviator type sunglasses. He had a copy of The Washington Post in his hands. Although his eyes were covered, the professor had the distinct feeling that he was not reading the newspaper, but instead was watching every person who boarded.

Saleem had no idea what Marzak looked like, but this had to be the man he was supposed to keep his eye on.

The officers settled in a group toward the front of the cabin and Saleem took a seat in a row behind them. Minutes after they boarded, the plane took off and began the first leg of its journey across the Atlantic Ocean.

Saleem had often regaled those attending his history classes that the past, present and future could not be treated separately, but as a single organism occupying space and time. Now here he was, proving his point. His present was caught up in a momentous past event that had its origins centuries before in the long lost kingdom of a legendary ruler. He preferred not to think about the future.

His cousin had asked him to watch Marzak. Easier said than done. If he turned around in his seat the man would notice. Nature in the form of a full bladder showed the way. He got up from his seat and made his way to the restroom at the rear of the cabin. As he walked down the aisle, he kept his eye on the flight attendant, who was puttering around in the space at the rear of the cabin.

He smiled at her, but at the last second, glanced at Marzak.

The man had removed his cap, revealing a platinum head of hair. He was reading a book that hid his face. Saleem was surprised to see from the cover that it was a book of poetry by William Blake. He was still looking at the title when the man lowered the book, pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead and gazed at the professor with topaz eyes.

There was something so alien and inhuman in the gaze that the professor felt weak-kneed, much the way a rabbit must feel when it has attracted the attention of a wolf.

He brushed by the flight attendant and locked himself in the restroom where he stared at his reflection in the mirror. His face was as white as a sheet and his skin was shiny with beads of perspiration. He quickly relieved himself, and then threw cold water in his face after washing his hands.

He took a deep breath, opened the door with a shaking hand and strode down the aisle to his seat.

With every step he felt those cold blue eyes boring into the back of his skull.

He settled back into his seat and waited for his rapid heartbeat to slow down.

Don’t let him out of your sight, Mohamed had said.

No worry about that, dear cousin, except for one small detail. The watcher was now the watched.

Sutherland drove her RAV4 up the driveway and saw a dozen or so agents herding a bedraggled group of men toward a line-up of white Border Patrol SUVs. As she pulled up to the house, a middle-aged Border Patrolman approached her vehicle. His name was Ed McHugh and she knew him from previous patrols.

“Afternoon, Miss Sutherland. Sorry for all the ruckus. We’re cleaning things up here as fast as we can.”

She got out of the SUV carrying a bag of newly purchased paints. “Looks like you’re having a busy day.”

McHugh nodded.

“Can’t complain. As long as these folks keep coming in, I’ll have job security.” He checked the progress of the round-up. “Looks like we’re ready to head out. Call me if you ever need help.”

She patted the shirt pocket that held her cell phone. “Got your number right here.”

He plunked his hat on and rejoined the other agents. The patrol vehicles trundled off her property with their fresh catch of Mexican illegal immigrants. Within weeks the same Border Patrol officers would be rounding up the same illegal aliens. But for now, the valley was peaceful again. The lowering sun would soon dab the rugged landscape with colors from its brilliant palette.

She went into the house, popped a cold can of Tecate from the refrigerator, then sat at her computer and called up the navy board of inquiry file on Hawkins. She reread the inquiry proceedings and out of curiosity typed Southie, the name of Hawkins’ CIA contact into a web browser.

Her West Virginia heritage had suggested that Southie had something to do with the southern part of the U.S. She was surprised that it was a nickname for the working class Irish neighborhood of South Boston. From the references she found, Southie was most famous as the home turf of gangster James “Whitey” Bulger.

Nothing there. She typed in the name Abrahim Noor Kahn and found a number of news stories on the drug lord. The most recent ones reported his death a day earlier during a DEA raid. Strange coincidence.

The New York Times story said Khan had been a CIA informant nicknamed “Honest Abe,” and was a double agent working with the Taliban. Before he was unmasked, he had been paid millions, flown to Washington to meet with CIA and DEA officials, wined and dined and taken on trips to New York, supposedly to meet with his attorney.

An enterprising Times photographer had snapped a photo of Honest Abe coming out of Macy’s. At the side of the bearded Afghan, clutching two shopping bags, was an unidentified broad-faced man. Both faces were slightly blurred.

The story on Honest Abe’s death quoted his attorney as saying that his client never supported the Taliban or worked with the C.I.A. The attorney admitted that the confusion may have been caused by his client’s work as a consultant to a well-connected military contractor known as Arrowhead.

Arrowhead’s elaborate website said the corporation was a full service risk management company, headquartered in Plano, Texas, with hundreds of employees worldwide, and that it specialized in “Democracy Transition.” Arrowhead operations were broken up into various specialties. Law enforcement. Strategic. Recruitment and Training. Anti-Terrorism. Except for scope and degree, the company was no different from any of the dozens of gun for hire groups that had sprung up around the world over the last couple of decades.

Like many regular soldiers, Sutherland considered military contractors as bottom feeders. Most mercenaries were former military men who earned big salaries for work that the people still working for Uncle Sam did for short money.

Sutherland noticed a link for The Arrowhead Foundation listed in small print on the website and clicked it. The U.S. registered charity had been set up to bring relief to war-torn environments. The list of projects included schools, water tanks, purification systems, generators and other small but important projects for poor communities.

She scrolled through the projects and stopped at one labeled Psychological Care for Children in Conflict. Sutherland had an interest in psychology stemming from her own mental issues so she clicked on the listing. The site carried a number of photos of Iraqi children with men and women who worked for an outfit called World-Wide Youth Counseling Services.

She stared with disbelief at a photo of a man handing a stuffed teddy bear to a child. The photo caption didn’t name the man, just described him as a psychological counselor, but there was no mistaking the gaunt features and puny chin of Dr. Trask, the hated psychologist who had ruined Hawkins and threatened to do the same with her! The attempt at a warm smile could only be described as grotesque.

There were two other armed men in the photo. One was in the background, and the other, standing next to the girl, resembled the same wide-faced man in the photo of Honest Abe coming out of Macy’s. She expanded the search on the foundation, combing the internet for any mention of the Children in Conflict site. She hit pay dirt in an online version of the Holy Cross college alumni magazine under the heading:

The article had the identical photo as the one on the Arrowhead site. The caption identified Trask only as a child psychologist, but it said the man with the gun was a BC alumni named Terrance A. Murphy. He had joined the Marines after college and served three tours in Iraq before mustering out to go to work for Arrowhead. The clip was a couple of years old and gave no indication of Murphy’s movements since then.

The detail that really caught her eye was Murphy’s home town. South Boston. And his nickname was Southie! She squinted at the screen. Was Murphy the CIA guy Hawkins talked to before going after Honest Abe? If so, his ties to the execrable Dr. Trask were disturbing. She had to know more.

Using the foundation’s charitable registration number from the website, she looked up its IRS 990-PF form listing the names of the foundation’s officers, directors, managers and contractors. She recognized none of the names, but noted them for a further look, then scrolled down to the list of grant recipients.

One of the recipients was World-Wide Youth Counseling Services.

She went back to the photo of Trask and found a strange coincidence. It was taken the year when, according to the alumni magazine article, Murphy was working for Arrowhead at the same time its foundation was awarding a grant to the children’s organization.

When Trask had first come into her life as a hatchet man for the navy, she had prepared a comprehensive dossier on him. She went back and looked into the file. There was no mention of his tie-in to the foundation or the navy. He was described as being in private practice, but this would not prevent him from hiring out as a consultant.

Sutherland was like a hound on the scent of a rabbit. Or in this case, a skunk. She got up from the computer and went out onto the patio to steady her nerves. The desert was unearthly quiet. She had missed the sunset. She breathed in the scent of sagebrush and went into the house for a protein bar and a Diet Coke. Back at her computer, she limbered her plump fingers like a piano virtuoso about to play Chopin’s Minute Waltz, and began to attack the computer keyboard.

She went into every aspect of the Arrowhead website. She dug further into IRS files. She used her far-ranging computer search program and picked up hundreds of references to the company. There were no other direct references linking Murphy or Trask. But she found that aside from a few projects, the organization actually did very little for children.

Sutherland decided to go right to the source, and wrote an email to the foundation director saying she wanted to donate money to the children’s development fund. She included her cell phone number.

Since it was night in Texas, she didn’t expect a reply, but her phone rang after a few minutes. It was the foundation director.

“I didn’t think anyone would be working this late,” Sutherland said.

“We’re 24/7 here,” the director answered. “Thank you for your offer,” she said, “but you might want to donate to other foundation projects. That project ended a couple of years ago, as the situation changed in Iraq.”

“Is there any way to get in touch with Dr. Trask? I saw his name on the website,” she lied. “Maybe he’s doing similar work that I can support.”

“I’ll have to do some research. I’ll get back to you.”

Sutherland thanked her, clicked off and stared into space. Hawkins knew Southie/Murphy. Murphy worked with Trask and went shopping with Honest Abe who ambushed Hawkins. She considered contacting Hawkins, but he was still in the air and she didn’t have enough to go on. She just knew something wasn’t right.

She wrote up a report, but decided to wait until she heard back from the foundation. If she didn’t hear from Arrowhead, she’d get in touch with Hawkins in the morning.

She yawned. It was almost bedtime.

After the call from Sutherland the foundation’s development officer went to the director and told him of the strange request to donate to the children’s charity and the question about Trask.

The director thanked her, closed his door and made a telephone call.

Sweat formed on Dr. Trask’s weak chin as he listened to the voice on the phone. How had Sutherland found him? There was no mention of his name anywhere in the company website. He thanked the director. He was calm and polite on the phone, but the moment the conversation ended, he frantically punched out a telephone number.

The phone chirped in a small, Spartan office in Falls Church, Virginia.

The hard-eyed man sitting behind a desk in the office listened intently, then said, “The 4^th Protocol? You’re sure of it?”

There was a verbal blast from the other end.

“I’ll need clearance from upstairs first.”

Trask said, “Stand by,” and hung up.

A minute later, the phone rang again and it was his supervisor, following up on Trask’s panicked call.

“You have the go-ahead to proceed. I’ll be sending you a file. You’re to act on this immediately.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

He hung up and turned to his computer. A minute later he was looking at a photo of a woman in her twenties. The face was plump but pretty. Under the head shot was a note:

“Apply the Fourth Protocol to the subject as soon as possible.”

Accompanying the photo was information on the subject. Following a pre-arranged procedure, the man began making a series of telephone calls that would bring together the personnel closest to the job into an action team.

The numbered protocols were a system of threat assessments and responses. The first protocol was meant to deal with someone who had made a casual inquiry about the business. The appropriate response was a background check.

If the inquirer persisted, the response would be quiet intimidation, mainly a suggestion that questions would be turned over to the legal department. If that didn’t work, Protocol Three was invoked, calling for a physical diversion of some sort. A car would be run off the road. A house would be burned down.

The subject’s inquiry by itself did not merit more than level one. But Dr. Trask’s standing in the organization pushed the matter into the final category.

The Fourth Protocol.

For which the only remedy was speedy eradication.

The pilot’s voice came over the cabin intercom and announced that the 747 had been cleared for landing. Hawkins gazed out the window as if in a trance as the big plane dropped into the bowl formed by the jagged mountains that surrounded the three-thousand-year-old city.

Moments later, the massive landing gear clomped down on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport, or Khawaja Rawash, as the locals called it. The airport had had more lives than a roomful of cats. The Russians built it in the 1960s and controlled it for ten years before the Red Army left the country and the airport fell into the hands of various militias. The Taliban held the airport until 2001 when U.S. forces kicked them out.

Hawkins recognized the industrial-styled air traffic tower that the Soviets had constructed, but the newer terminal wasn’t there the last time he had seen the airport. Since the U.S. invasion, planes from a dozen or so civilian airlines were allowed to fly in and out, but the airport was still heavily used by the military. As the plane taxied to a cargo area, it passed rows of big transport planes and muscular helicopters.

The movable stairway was rolled up to the plane and Hawkins and Calvin descended to the tarmac. Hawkins stared off toward the mountains that were nearly invisible in the haze and filled his lungs. The whiff of cool, dry Afghan air triggered memories of his first arrival in the country as part of a SEAL team.

He exhaled. “Home sweet home.”

“Place still stinks,” Calvin grumbled.

Hawkins knew he wasn’t talking about odors.

Abby bustled down the gangway and broke up their remembrance of things past. “You guys look like a couple of lost tourists. May I remind you that we’re here to get a job done.”

Calvin had a thoughtful look in his eye as he watched Abby stride purposefully over to the plane’s cargo door. “That’s some woman. How come she never made admiral? Sure as hell acts like one.”

“Navy’s not ready for a female John Paul Jones. Especially a pretty one. Abby’s right about getting a job done, though. Let’s give her a hand.”

They followed Abby to a mobile loading platform that had been elevated to the cargo door. The desert vehicle was moved out of the plane first, then the dollies holding the submersible and dive equipment, and finally the boxes of firearms and survival gear.

Calvin peeled the protective foam off the Desert Patrol Vehicle. “Well, what do you think?” he said.

Hawkins let his eyes roam over the wing-shaped purple fiberglass side panels emblazoned with yellow flames, the wire-spoke aluminum wheels, the burnt red lay-down seats and the chrome bumpers and headlights. The rails and roll bar were decorated with orange and black stripes.

He folded his arms and said, a pained expression on his face, “Where did you get this road rocket, Cal?”

“It’s mine,” Calvin said. “I bought it from a military supplier and customized it.”

“I especially like the camouflage pattern and colors. Not bad.”

Calvin lovingly placed his hand on a side panel. “This baby’s more than ‘not bad,’ Hawk. I’ve squeezed some more oomph out of the 200 horsepower VW engine. You have to fight the steering wheel because of the torque, but she’ll do zero to sixty in less than ten seconds and get up to over a hundred miles per hour. I’ve built in added fuel capacity, so she’s good for more miles in between gas stations. What do you-all think, Abby?”

Abby gazed at the vehicle and pinched her chin. “I like it.”

Calvin gave her a brisk salute. “Obviously you are a woman of discrimination.”

Hawkins shook his head, then borrowed a fork lift to lift the plastic foam case containing Fido onto the vehicle’s luggage carrier where it was secured with bungee cords and rope. The other gear was tied down to running board racks on both sides.

“What time do you want the chopper tomorrow?” Abby said.

“I want to get off the ground while it’s still dark,” Hawkins said. “The sun comes up around five. How about three-thirty?”

She made a quick phone call and after a brief conversation said, “You’ve got it. Our ride will be here at three.” A smile replaced the no-nonsense set of her mouth. “The mission is all yours after that. You get the chance to boss me around.” She pecked both men on the cheek and pointed to the terminal. “VIP immigration is through that door.”

Abby had used her corporate clout and listed Hawkins and Calvin as employees of her company. They showed their passports, submitted to an automated bio data scan and entered the terminal. The scene was one of ordered chaos. There were long queues of departing passengers and dozens of armed Afghan security guards. Hawkins marveled at the duty-free boutiques that had opened since his last pass through.

Abby was leading the way to the exit, with Calvin and Hawkins right behind, when a big man cut between them. The red hair was streaked with gray, but Hawkins immediately recognized the jovial-tough face of Terrance Murphy. He caught him by the arm, and Murphy snapped his head around, a scowl on his wide face.

In a stage Irish brogue, Hawkins said, “Is it yourself off in such a rush, Mr. Murphy?”

The angry expression vanished and Murphy spread his lips in the toothy white smile that used to remind Hawkins of the Kennedy clan.

“Jesusmaryjoseph! Is that you, Hawk? And Calvin, too.”

Hawkins extended his hand. “Been a long time, Murph.”

“Indeed it has,” Murphy said, crunching Hawkins’ fingers, then Calvin’s in his vise-like grip.

Abby noticed that her friends had stopped. Hawkins waved her over and introduced her to Murphy.

“This is Terrance Murphy. Murph is a pal of ours from the old days,” Hawkins said.

Murphy gave Abby the full blast of his white smile. “A pleasure to meet you.”

“Never expected to find you still here after all these years,” Calvin said.

Murphy gave out a big laugh. “Neither did I. I’m with the DEA. I left the government after you were transferred out and worked as a private contractor. Good money, but I got tired of body-guarding the embassy crowd and applied to be a drug cop. Everyone else from the old gang is either dead or gone home.”

“I saw Commander Kelly not too long ago,” Hawkins said. “He’s very much alive. He’s a weapons consultant for the Pentagon.”

“I could have done the same thing, but you know me. I’ve got to be where the action is.”

Hawkins swept his eyes around the terminal. “Things have changed.”

“Don’t let this fool you. It’s still like Dodge City out in the ‘burbs. The bad guys sneak in to raise hell whenever they get the chance. Which leads me to inquire what prompted you to leave your cushy job to come back to this garden spot?”

Abby saved Hawkins the trouble of making up an answer.

“We’re here on a job for Global Logistics.”

“Great organization. Maybe I can help. I’ve got a lot of contacts, especially through the DEA.”

“Maybe,” Hawkins said. “Let’s talk about it later.”

“It’s a deal. I’ve got a car outside. We can chat on the way to your hotel.”

“Thanks, Mr. Murphy. I’ve already made arrangements,” Abby interjected.

“Efficient, aren’t you?” Murphy said. “Where are you staying?”

“The Serena,” Abby said.

“Good choice. How about dinner?”

“We’ve got plans,” Abby said, much to Hawkins’ surprise.

They agreed to meet after dinner and parted company. A leased SUV was waiting outside the airport to take them along the heavily-trafficked main road to the city. On the ride in Abby asked about Murphy.

“Your friend seems quite the character. The operational decisions will be yours, but are you really considering bringing him into this mission?”

“Only in a limited way, for intel. As he said, he has lots of contacts. I haven’t been here in five years and the place has changed a lot since then.” He gestured out the window. “Murph knows who the players are.”

“My impression is that he is one of the players.”

Hawkins nodded.

“Murph came into Afghanistan with the first wave of CIA agents who turned the local tribesman against the Taliban,” Hawkins said. “We shared intelligence for a number of missions. I left and he stayed.”

“That’s unusual to stay here all that time.”

“Most people count the days. But Murphy is like a soldier of fortune back in the heyday of the British Empire.”

“A mercenary, in other words.”

Hawkins thought about it. “More complicated. He’s just someone who was born out of time.”

“Humph,” Abby said, pinioning Hawkins in a narrow-eyed stare. “Your friend Murphy wasn’t the only one born out of time.”

The Hotel Serena was about a twenty-minute drive from the airport, close to government ministries and foreign embassies and overlooking a beautiful park. With its carefully landscaped gardens, swimming pool, classic Islamic architecture and cool interiors, the hotel had long been an oasis of calm away from the frenetic pace of the city. That tranquility was shattered in 2008 when a Taliban suicide squad attack killed several guests. Since then, security had been beefed up.

After being thoroughly checked out by the police guarding the entrance, the taxi pulled up under the hotel portico and its three passengers got out. The receptionist smiled when he saw Abby walk over to the desk.

“Welcome back to Kabul, Ms. McWilliams. A pleasure to see you again.”

“Thank you. It’s good to be back.”

“You get around,” Hawkins said as the clerk went to fetch the room keys.

“I stay here whenever I’m in town on business,” Abby said. “I’m in Kabul two or three times a year. How about dinner in about an hour?”

Calvin shook his head. “Being my usual anal self. I’m gonna drop my stuff off and head back to airport to double-check that all my hardware made it intact. I’ll grab a sandwich and catch up with you later.”

Abby made dinner reservations for two in the hotel’s Silk Route restaurant and told Matt to let Murphy know, then they all took the elevator up to the top floor where they had adjoining rooms. On his way to a shower, Hawkins passed a full-length mirror. His shirt looked as if it had been trampled by a buffalo and his jeans were ripe. He called the desk clerk on the hotel phone and asked if he knew of a men’s clothing store nearby.

“Yes. There’s a Joseph A. Banks not far from here.”

Hawkins gave the clerk a list of clothes and sizes, and said he would be very happy if he could arrange delivery in forty-five minutes. He took a long hot shower and had just wiped the shaving cream off his chin when he heard a knock at the door. It was the smiling desk clerk holding a plastic bag.

Hawkins inspected the black cashmere blazer, blue shirt and olive tan slacks to make sure they were the right size and gave the clerk a fifty dollar tip. Where he was going, Hawkins wouldn’t need money.

He slipped into his new clothes and looked in the mirror again. A fashionable gentleman had replaced the scruffy figure who had stared back at him earlier. Abby called and said she was almost ready. When he knocked, she came to her door dressed in a high collar patterned black velvet shift dress with partially sheer sleeves. Black stockings showcased her long slender legs. She was modest and sexy at the same time. Except for her onyx and silver earrings, she wore no jewelry, but she didn’t need any ornaments.

Hawkins eyed Abby from head to toe. “You make me look like a home insurance salesman.”

She took in his muscular form that filled out the shoulders and chest of his blazer.

“Not at all. You’re quite dapper. The work boots are a nice touch.”

“Woods Hole chic,” Hawkins explained.

He offered his arm and guided her to the elevator.

The maitre d’ recognized Abby who told him that they needed a quiet table with room for two more joining them after dinner. He led them across the lavishly appointed restaurant to a table covered with a starched white cloth and set in a small section separate from the dining room.

Hawkins glanced around. “I must admit that the last time I was in this country my accommodations weren’t as nice as this.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you here. It will be a few days before we enjoy comfort like this again.”

Hawkins flashed a tight smile. “Glad you brought the subject up, Abby. I wish you’d reconsider your decision to go on the operation.”

“Uh-uh. Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

“Okay, but I want you to level with me. Why?”

“Despite the flip comment I made on the plane about this being no guilt trip, I do owe you for the way I cut you loose.”

“I never blamed you for walking out, Abby.”

“And I don’t blame you for being bitter. I could deal with your fury against the navy. But not against the world.”

“I’m past my Captain Queeg phase. I understand why you left me — I was bouncing off the walls — but why did you leave the navy?”

“The navy has come a long way and I made a rank that was unthinkable not long ago. But I could have commanded a carrier, and that just wasn’t going to happen.”

“You would have made a terrific commander.”

“Thanks for your confidence.’

“And you think by taking this mission you can show the navy that they were fools to pass you over.”

“Something like that,” she said, a slight smirk on her lips. “God, what a fine pair we are.”

They broke into laughter that made some of the other patrons look their way. Abby had to put her napkin to her lips to stifle her mirth.

The outburst caught the attention of the waiter, who hurried over to take their order. They both opted for lamb kabobs sprinkled with sumac, palao rice topped with fried raisins, carrots and pistachios and served with the long thin afghan bread called naan. Over dinner, Hawkins reminisced about his more pleasant Afghan memories. The waiter was removing the last plate when the maitre d’ escorted Calvin to their table. Murphy joined them a few minutes later.

Murphy said, “My offer about helping still stands, but you’ll have to fill me in on the skinny. Like where are you headed?”

“I can’t tell you everything. Let me start by asking you a question. What do you know about Amir Kahn?”

“You going into Amir Kahn’s neighborhood?”

Hawkins shrugged.

Murphy pushed at the air with his big hand. “None of my business, mate, but I’ll tell you what you’re dealing with. Amir is probably in his late sixties now, but tough as nails. He was a non-political teacher, but became a mujadeen during the Soviet war. Killed lots of Russians on his own long before the CIA stuck a Stinger missile launcher in his hands. He probably turned the tide on his own from what I hear.”

“What happened after the war?”

“He was wounded in action and went to the U.S. to recuperate. The CIA brought him back to fight the Taliban, but he got disgusted with both sides. He went back to his home province and started raising opium. He’s one of the biggest dope producers in the country.”

“You’re DEA now. Have you tried to stop him?”

“Whole program is about interdiction now. Tried wiping out the poppy fields and the farmers got mad as hell. Now they grow all they want, they get paid and we plug the holes where we can. Amir is a special case.”

“In what way, Murph?”

“He’s related to the ruling family. Cousin or something, but still close enough to make sure there’s a protective shield over his operation. On top of that, he supports a private army of about two hundred tribesmen.”

“Have you ever met him?”

“Once. We were after a miserable sonovabitch who had tried to kill one of our guys. Unfortunately for him, he tried to move in on Amir’s territory, which adjoined his. When I caught up with him Amir had just turned him and his men into shish kebabs. When I thanked the old bandit he just looked at me with the coldest set of eyes I’d ever seen and asked me to spread the word.”

“What word?”

“He said that anyone who entered his territory without invitation would be killed on sight.”

“Guess we’d best stay away from Mr. Friendly,” Calvin said with a drawl.

“Wise decision. The countryside is rugged as hell. Lots of ravines, canyons, gullies. Great spots for ambushes.” Murphy leaned back in his chair and looked first at Hawkins, then at Calvin. “I’d suggest that you have a guide.”

Hawkins shook his head. “This was designed to be a pretty tight little operation, Murph.”

“A third person shouldn’t make that much difference,” Murphy said.

“That would be a fourth person,” Abby said. “I’m part of this mission, too.”

Murphy stared at Abby for several seconds and took a deep breath. “Guide who knows the country will help you move faster. Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time running around in circles.”

Hawkins turned to Hayes. “What do you say, Cal? Do you have room for a fourth?”

Hayes shrugged. “Sure, if we pack the desert vehicle the right way.”

“Thanks, Cal. Who is this person who knows the area so well?”

“Guy grew up around the warlord’s territory. He’s been working as a civilian security contractor. He knows how to handle himself.”

“Could he be ready by tomorrow?”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’s in the lounge.”

“That’s a coincidence,” Abby said.

“Not really. He comes here every night to make connections with the movers and shakers.”

Murphy made a quick call on his cell phone. Moments later, a man wearing a dark suit and white shirt with no tie approached the table. Murphy pulled over a chair and gestured for the man to sit down.

“This is Rashid,” Murphy said.

Murphy’s friend was in his mid-thirties. He was short and stocky and had a friendly grin that puffed out the plump cheeks on his wide, clean-shaven face. His head was shaved as well.

Hawkins quizzed the man about his background. He answered politely in a soft-spoken voice. His English was very good. He had been born in a nearby village and moved to Kabul in his teens. After a stint in the Afghan army he was hired by a contractor to provide security to government officials. Hawkins asked Rashid if he knew about the lake.

“The Valley of the Dead? Oh yes. I lived in a village around fifty kilometers from there.”

“Is there a way to get to the lake without being seen?”

“Many ways. Some better than others.”

Calvin asked specific questions as to terrain features he had seen on the satellite photo, and when he was finished, he said, “Man knows his stuff.”

Hawkins said, “What do you think, Abby?”

“I said the mission is yours from now on.”

“I don’t want to put either one of you in unnecessary danger. Looks like you’re joining the team, Rashid. Meet us at four am tomorrow at the airport.”

Hawkins rose from his chair to signal that the meeting was over. He thanked Murphy for his help and said he would look him up when he got back to Kabul. On the elevator ride to their floor, Calvin said that he had double-checked all their weapons and gone over their survival gear. Everything was ready.

Hawkins said he would see Cal and Abby in the morning then he wrote a quick email to Sutherland, set the alarm clock, slipped beneath the sheets and quickly fell asleep.

Murphy was in a glum mood.

He was hardly a Victorian gentleman, but he loved women. Especially pretty ones like Abby. Hell, he could hardly keep his eyes off her! After leaving the dining room he had gone into the lounge. It was hard to get a real drink in Kabul, so he carried a hip flask with him. He ordered fruit juice and spiked it with bourbon. He downed the drink and ordered another, which he also doctored. The alcohol was giving him the illusion of acute mental clarity.

He looked up from his glass into Rashid’s moist brown eyes. He had hired Rashid for a number of jobs. Despite his warm manner, the guide was a cold-blooded killer whose efficiency was marred only by his sadistic penchant for torturing his victims. Especially women. Murphy figured Rashid’s mother must have done a real number on him. Oh well. Can’t have everything, Murphy thought.

Speaking in a low voice, Murphy said, “When you take care of the woman, I want you to do it fast. No hanky-panky. Make it clean. Get me?”

Rashid’s friendly grin was out of synch with his words. “I’ll kill her so fast she won’t even know it,” he whispered.

Murphy stared at the Afghan for a few seconds, then slowly nodded. “See that you do,” he said.

Rashid returned the nod, slid off his stool and headed for the exit.

Murphy watched him leave then poured another stiff shot into his glass.

The Pakistani plane refueled in Paris and took off on the second leg of its long journey. The professor slept. Ate the meals served to him. Watched a couple of bad movies on the small screen. Got up to stretch and chat with the army officers about their training experiences. He stayed away from the back of the plane, using the restroom near the flight deck.

When the plane landed in Islamabad, a waiting shuttle bus picked up the passengers and dropped the officers off at the terminal. The professor and Marzak were driven a short distance to a helicopter with no markings on the fuselage.

They climbed into the helicopter and buckled up. Marzak eyed the professor’s civilian clothes. “Who are you?’

“I am Saleem. I’m with the intelligence services. I believe we have mutual friends we are about to see.”

Marzak raised an eyebrow, but made no reply. The professor was relieved when the engine started and the spinning rotors drowned out the possibility of conversation.

The helicopter rose above the city and headed west, flying for ninety minutes before setting down in a field where they disembarked with their luggage. The helicopter took off and left them standing there in silence until a dust-covered old Chevrolet Impala raced across the field and slowed to a stop.

The car doors opened, and three men carrying AK-47s got out. The men frisked Marzak and relieved the professor of his satellite phone, then blind-folded both men and gestured for them to get in the back of the car, squeezed tightly with a guard on either side. The professor felt the car bump along for a short while, then the ride smoothed out as they left the field for a road. Fifteen minutes later the car stopped again, and they were told to get out.

The men grabbed them by their shoulders and guided them a short distance. When their blindfolds were removed, the professor saw that they were in a windowless room furnished with a small table and three wooden chairs.

The man sitting behind the table had black hair neatly cut and parted, and a short wiry beard. He was dressed in a conservative western-style black suit and wore a white shirt and no tie.

He had small delicate hands, warm, dark eyes and a soft-spoken manner. He wore no traditional headdress, suggesting that he was urban and educated, which he confirmed when he said he that they could call him the Doctor. “I am pediatrician,” he said, unnecessarily adding, “I treat children.”

He told his guests to have a seat and poured glasses of tea from a pitcher.

He acknowledged Saleem with a nod of his head.

“You must be the professor.” Then he looked at Marzak. “And you are the Jeweler.”

The professor sensed something unspoken pass between the men. Marzak’s half smile grew into a broad grin, as if he had suddenly recognized an old friend in a crowd. A chill ran down the professor’s spine.

“Thank you for coming all this way,” the Doctor said. “We appreciate the work on the Prophet’s Necklace that you and your brother have been doing for us. I’m sorry he is not with you. Is he well?”

“No,” Marzak said, with no change in expression. “He is dead.”

The man’s heavy mono-brow formed a V. “I am sorry to hear that. An accident?”

“In a manner of speaking. He was killed during the course of an assignment.”

“By an American?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to provide more details.”

“Let me tell you something,” the Doctor said. “When you first made contact and offered to serve us I thought it might be a CIA trick, even after you killed an enemy of ours to persuade us of the sincerity of your intentions. You were mercenaries, working for money, and you were not of the Faith.”

“I have no faith,” Marzak said.

“That is not important now. We are kin, bound together by blood. The Americans killed my brother, too,” the Doctor said. “And his wife and children. The cowards sent their drone airplane to bomb their house. That is how I came to be in the Shadows. We have all had friends or family killed by the Americans. Our goal is revenge.”

“A laudable goal, Doctor.”

“We have watched failure after failure. The shoe bomber. The underwear bomber. Pitiful attempts by amateurs. Then came the assassination of Bin Laden. We feel that if we do not act, we will become irrelevant. Which is why we are so interested in your plan. Please bring me up to date on the necklace.”

“The clasp can be connected at any time. The strands run from coast to coast. There are a half dozen beads. Each one represents a location where large numbers of people gather. An explosive device in an innocent form has been hidden in each place. When the explosive is activated, it will spread sarin over a large area. Ingestion through the lungs or skin contact will be fatal.”

Sarin.

The professor folded his arms in front of him in an attempt to hide his trembling hands. He needn’t have worried, because the two men were deep into a discussion of the physiological effects of the deadly chemical nerve agent. He knew that sarin was 500 times more potent than cyanide and that it worked on humans the same way bug spray killed insects, but with more horrible effects leading to death.

As a member of an elite intelligence service, the professor had been exposed to the venality of every type of human behavior, ranging from suicide bombers who killed children to political assassins who killed women. But as he sat in the small room listening to a quiet discussion of how to murder scores of people, he knew he had never before been in the presence of such evil incarnate.

“How many casualties do you estimate?” the Doctor said.

“Impossible to say, but it will keep the undertakers busy for a long while.”

The Doctor closed his eyes, a beatific smile on his face, then opened them. “The simple purity of your plan is appealing. How will you trigger simultaneous explosions?”

“I will call a certain telephone number and enter a code that will activate the explosions at the same second. Just give me the signal and it will be done.”

“As soon as we acquire the treasure.” The Doctor stared at the professor, as if reading his thoughts. “I understand that our plans must be daunting to consider.”

Saleem knew better than to lie, outright.

“They are very ambitious. I worry about people of Pakistan origin who live in the U.S. and might be harmed.”

“We have considered that,” the Doctor said. “Those people have gone over to the infidels. They have become one with them in life and so shall they be in death.”

The professor nodded.

“But don’t think we are murderers. We merely want to cripple the United States. It’s like disfiguring a man’s wife in front of her husband to teach him a lesson in humility. Marzak understands, don’t you?”

“With crystal clarity, Doctor,” Marzak said.

The professor’s mouth felt as if he had eaten sand. His legs wanted to carry him far away from these two madmen, but he willed his facial muscles to show no hint of the emotions roiling inside his chest.

“Have no fear. I understand as well,” he said.

“Good. Now that Marzak is here we will pursue our immediate objective.”

“I have contracted for an assault team I’ve used in other assignments,” Marzak said. “Pulling together the dive team was a little more difficult, but I have four divers with combat and salvage experience. We will have three Bell Cobra helicopters and a transport helicopter.”

“What do you think?” The Doctor asked Saleem. “Enough to do the job?”

“More than enough,” the professor replied. “The Cobras are devastating weapons.”

“Good. An assault force made up of tribesmen has arrived at a staging area closer to the target,” the Doctor said. “While the Cobras deal with Amir Kahn, your divers will go into the lake to retrieve the treasure. The Cobras will also come in handy should the American mission arrive.”

“A sound military strategy,” Saleem said. “Since we are footing the bill for this mission, ISI maintains operational control, but I will try to stay in the background as an observer.”

“Yes, yes,” the Doctor said. “I’m sure the arrangement will work out fine, aren’t you, Mr. Marzak?”

Marzak said, “As long as there is no interference with military decisions.”

“Of course. We owe a great deal to the ISI,” the Doctor said to Saleem. “Without the intelligence service we would not have known that the Americans were sending an expedition of their own. You and the Jeweler will be our guests tonight and fly out tomorrow to an advance base.”

The meeting was over.

The Doctor called in a guard to show the guests to their quarters. Saleem was glad to see that his room had a bathroom with a working shower. He stripped and turned the shower up to full. He didn’t know if he could wash evil away with cold water, but he tried.

As he toweled himself dry he realized that he had fulfilled the first part of his assignment faster than he could have imagined. He had important details of the Prophet’s Necklace, but without his phone he had no way to share the intelligence with his cousin. He stared at the blank walls of his room, and although he was not a religious man, he began to pray for a miracle.

A few minutes after three o’clock in the morning Hawkins and Abby watched as Calvin drove the Desert Patrol Vehicle out of a shed and pulled up to the Boeing Vertol 234 model helicopter. The civilian version of the battle-tested CH-47 Chinook leased by Abby’s company had tandem rotors located at the front and back of the long snub-nosed fuselage.

The temperature had dropped at least thirty degrees overnight and their breath vaporized in the cold air. They were all dressed in heavy duty beige pants and shirts, tan baseball caps and matching windbreakers over fleece sweaters. The choice of clothing had been the subject of intense discussion. They ultimately chose the civilian work clothes, hoping that they might pass for engineers or archaeologists.

Calvin got out of the DPV and he and Hawkins passed a nylon sling beneath the vehicle. The rope from the sling was attached to a single length of chain with a loop at one end.

They went over the check list to make sure they had all their gear, and that the equipment was securely tied down and protected. Abby signaled the pilot with a wave of her hand. The powerful engines roared to life and the twin rotors started spinning. The team climbed into the helicopter and settled in a row of seats next to Rashid. Abby made a point of sitting far from the guide. There was something about the man she didn’t like. She had caught him staring at her breasts a few times and hadn’t been flattered by the attention.

The helicopter lifted off and when it was around fifty feet in the air, it shifted sideways until it was over the Desert Patrol Vehicle. A cable was lowered to the ground crew, which attached it to the sling and a winch lifted the vehicle into the air. The helicopter rose at a slow, steady rate to keep the load from swinging wildly.

The sky was going from black to a blue-gray light that revealed the jagged snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush mountain range rising above the city.

The racket from the tandem engines and chop of rotors ratcheted up to an ear-shattering decibel level. Hawkins put on his headphones and motioned to their hired guide to do the same.

He unfolded a laminated map of their target area and showed the guide the landing zone he had in mind.

“That’s good,” Rashid said. He raised his voice even though it wasn’t necessary with the headphones. “It is flat here, with low hills to hide us.”

“What about the terrain between the LZ and the lake?”

“Very rugged. But there is a dry river bed that goes almost all the way to the lake like a super highway.”

“Any chance of someone seeing us on this highway?” Calvin asked.

“Not much. The village and the fields are on the other side of the lake.”

“What about planes?” Hawkins said. “There’s an airstrip near Khan’s compound.”

“The planes go away from the lake, toward Iran, to smuggle drugs.”

“You seem to know a lot more about this territory than its topography,” Hawkins said.

Rashid dabbed the map with his forefinger.

“I come from a village, here. Many of the men have gone to work for the Kahn.”

The helicopter gained altitude and transected the mountains through a high pass to the south, before turning in a more westerly direction and following the line of the 600-mile-long mountain range running northeast to southwest across the country. They passed over green fields, flat-roofed villages and meandering rivers, but these gentle features were rare exceptions. From the air, much of Afghanistan looked like a battlefield of the gods where unimaginable forces had collided and torn the earth’s crust apart, then stitched the tectonic plates back together like an insane surgeon.

Hawkins knew from experience that there was a subterranean world beneath the hard surface of the land. Parts of the country were honey-combed with caves. Some were natural. Others had been dug by men as places to live, as religious shrines, to extract lapis lazuli, to irrigate the fields, to hide in while fighting invaders. And just maybe, one had been used to hold a fabulous treasure.

As the helicopter sped southwest at a speed of a hundred-fifty-miles per hour, the scenery below changed from mountains and valleys to hills and deserts. Hawkins had been keeping tabs on their progress using his hand-held GPS set. After about two hours of flying, he rose from his seat and went to the cockpit to talk to the crew. He returned moments later and said, “ETA is fifteen minutes.”

The helicopter began a long shallow descent and eventually came to a hover above a relatively flat stretch of terrain. The lake could be seen shimmering in the distance.

The winch lowered the desert vehicle until the wheels touched the ground. The automatic hook release was activated then the helicopter moved sideways fifty feet or so and descended slowly until the landing gear thumped to the ground.

The passengers disembarked one-by-one then the door closed behind them and the helicopter was in the air again.

Hawkins and Calvin checked their weapons — Sig-Sauer 9mm pistol for Hawkins and the short-barreled CAR-15 rifle for Calvin — then while Calvin stood guard at the dune buggy, Rashid led the others to some high ground that offered a wide view of the surrounding landscape. The scenery reminded Matt of the badlands found in the southwestern U.S. Rashid said the river bed ran along the base of a low ridge of sandstone bluffs.

They heard the engine start, and then the vehicle ascended the hill and skidded to a stop.

“Going my way?” Calvin said. He had a wide grin on his face.

“You’re enjoying this a little too much, Cal.”

“Hey, Hawk, you’ve got to admit it feels good to be back in the saddle.”

Hawkins glanced around at the washboard topography before he climbed onto the rear of the vehicle next to Abby.

“Okay. I’ll agree with you that this is pretty exciting.”

Abby brought them both down to earth.

“We’ll see just how long that lasts,” she said.

Sutherland had spent a peaceful day in her studio working on a painting of a Rufus hummingbird. When she was satisfied that the colors were right, she took a break to enjoy the sunset and a cold Tecate. She cooked herself some vegetarian tacos, watched the Bachelor on television and sneered at the long-legged bimbos, then headed to her office desk and booted up her computer. The first thing she saw was a message from Hawkins dated several hours before.

Sutherland read the message again.

“Crap!” she said. Her fingers flew over the keyboard.

She sat back in her chair and waited for an answer knowing it would not come. Hawkins was out of reach. She raged at the screen. She should never have been away from her computer for so long. How could she be so stupid?

Now what?

Her only weapons were her old laptop and her proficiency at using it. Matt still had his satellite phone and he said he would call. She had to assume that he’d keep his promise. She spent the next few hours compiling a report on all the information she had gathered on the links between Murphy, Trask and Arrowhead. Maybe she could get it to Hawkins before he got in too deep with this Murphy character.

She murmured a prayer and pressed the Send command.

Cait sat in her room going over the photos transferred from the camera to her computer. The photo taken deep in the shaft showed the letters J. W. carved into the timber with a date, March 11, 1920, the year Kurtz launched his expedition.

She picked up her copy of “The Emerald Sceptre” and began to read. The author, a reporter for the Denver Post named Wayne Valero, opened the book by quoting a letter Prester John had written to the Byzantine emperor of Rome, Manuel, in 1177 in which the Prester bragged about his wealth and power and said he had vanquished the infidels who surrounded his kingdom. Skeptics pointed to parts of the letter that said the kingdom was home to men with horns and giants who had one eye, unicorns and gryphons, places where poison would not work, and a fountain of youth. According to the letter, no one in Prester John’s land could tell a lie.

Valero then went on to describe how one of the many agents Kurtz employed in his worldwide quest, while foraging in a Kabul antiquities shop, came across a fragment of a letter, written in Latin on vellum. The ragged edge suggested that it had been roughly torn from a scroll. Drawn on the back of the vellum were some child-like squiggles. The letter appeared to be from Prester John. This discovery had been the catalyst for Kurtz’s Prester John expedition.

The author had dogged the trail that led Kurtz to Afghanistan. His persistence paid off. He found a journalist’s dream: a reliable source in the widow of an expedition archaeologist who had died at sea on the return trip. She let the reporter see papers her husband had compiled before the expedition.

The archaeologist had submitted the vellum scrap to experts who dated it to the 12^th century. The same tests that verified its ancient origin led to another interesting discovery. The squiggles had been drawn in human blood. The archaeologist had copied down the message on a separate sheet of paper:

The mention of a special gift sent Valero back to the origin of the Prester John legend in a letter written by Otto, bishop of Freisingen, who in 1145 met with a Syrian bishop. The Syrian told him about a Christian king and priest known as Presbyter John, whose kingdom lay beyond Persia and Armenia. John belonged to a Christian sect known as Nestorians and had defeated the infidels in a number of battles. He was supposedly descended from the Magi, was rich beyond belief, and used as the emblem of his power and wealth an emerald scepter.

Valero heard an echo of Otto’s report in the Prester’s vellum letter to the Pope: What better gift to show a willingness to share power but the fabled scepter? Or did the scepter symbolize a gift even more valuable than gold and gems: an alliance to fight the Muslim infidels?

The archaeologist’s widow told Valero that one of Kurtz’s historic researchers had found a clue in an old map of caravan routes that had an X labeled Itmud. The archaeologists nicknamed the site “It’s mud” after the expedition visited the place and found a cluster of tall tower-like geological formations like those known as ‘hoo-doos’ in the southwestern United States. The researchers would have dismissed the map as a fake, except that the name Itmud meant pillar.

Intrigued by the coincidence, the researchers dug at the site and found artifacts that indicated Itmud may have been a trading post or a caravan stop. The map showed a dotted line leading across the desert to a valley vaguely shaped like a figure eight.

Cait skimmed through the next part of the book. Kurtz travels to the valley and discovers it full of water. Its shape matches the drawing on the back of the vellum signed by the Prester. He orders in dive equipment. The diver goes into the lake where the diagram indicates there should be a cave opening, but for some reason can’t find it. Kurtz sinks a mine shaft below the odd rock formation. The shaft collapses and traps the diver.

The story ended with the tragic loss of Kurtz’s archaeological crew in the sinking of one of his vessels on the return trip to the States. The rest of the book was pure speculation, with Valero postulating that Kurtz found the treasure, but it was likely lost with his ship.

Cait set the book down and reflected on what she had read, but a knock at the door pulled her thoughts back to the present. It was Amir.

“The family missed you at lunch,” he said. “Especially the little one. They sent me to make sure you are coming to dinner.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been reviewing materials and forgot about the time. Look at this.”

Amir stepped into the guest quarters, settled his long body into a chair and studied the photo on the computer screen. Cait pointed out the date of the expedition and described her theory about the mine being built because the treasure trove was not accessible from the lake.

He rubbed his beard. “Not an implausible theory, but as you discovered, the mine shaft is too dangerous to explore.”

“Even dead ends are informative. Building a mine shaft is neither easy nor cheap. It tells me that Kurtz believed that there was a treasure.”

“Do you think he found it?”

It was Cait’s turn to rub her chin. “I don’t know. But I’m determined to track it down.”

Amir gazed at Cait with amusement in his dark eyes. “It seems that Mr. Kurtz is not the only one obsessed with Prester John.”

“I prefer to think of it as a passion. Do you blame me?”

“Not at all. The Prester is a fascinating historical figure.”

“Agreed, but no one has been able to prove that John even existed. My goal now is to find the rest of the vellum. Then I might be able to backtrack to the Prester’s kingdom. Maybe I can locate his tomb! Even if I don’t, I could be on the trail of the historical and archaeological discovery of the century.”

“I will do all I can to help you, Dr. Cait. Where do you go from here?”

“Back to the beginning. Prester John.”

“We’re talking millions of square miles spread over several countries.”

“This will be a journey in time rather than distance. We know the Pope sent his physician Philip east to deliver a letter to Prester John, so I went into the Vatican data base. I went through every link I could find on Pope Alexander and Master Philip. Let me show you something I turned up in my research.”

She brought a letter with graceful handwriting onto the screen.

“What is it?”

“The Vatican archives had a fragment of a note, written from Philip in Jerusalem, dated 1177 anno domini. It was a bill which asked for papal reimbursement of expenses to Philip’s bank in Rome:

“This proved that Philip had intentions to leave Jerusalem,” Amir observed. “Who is this Thomas?”

“I wish I knew. My immediate challenge is to find Philip’s journal. I need to do more research before I go back into the field. There are sources all over the world. Libraries and archives in Rome, Vienna, Paris, London and the U.S.”

“Then you have made a decision to leave us?”

“Tomorrow, if possible.”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry your visit is so short. My family is quite attached to you.”

“I like them, too. But I will return. I can never repay you for your hospitality and help”

“I’m the one who is in your debt, Dr. Cait. If Prester John hadn’t brought you here, my granddaughter would not have lived.”

Cait stared off into space. “I’m not a superstitious person, and as a historian I deal in facts, but when you study events and people over thousands of years, it’s amazing how things seem to fall into place, as if they had been pre-ordained. There have been times when Prester John seems to be calling me to find him.”

“Grandfather!”

They exchanged glances and started laughing.

“It seems that Prester John has the voice of a very impatient four-year-old girl,” Amir said.

Cait sat cross-legged on the living room floor after dinner, engaged in an intense game of patty-cake with Amir’s granddaughter. She happened to look up and noticed that the drug lord, seated in his chair, was gazing thoughtfully in her direction.

Then Amir said something in Pashto to the little girl, who responded with a pout that was vanquished with the offer of a sweet pastry. The little girl gave her grandfather a peck on the cheek, came over and planted a wet kiss on Cait’s face, and ran off into the next room. The scene was so affecting that Cait forgot for a moment that the kindly grandfather was a hardened drug lord.

She rose to her feet.

“Thank you,” she said in a breathless voice that was only partially exaggerated. “I was becoming patty-caked to exhaustion.”

“Yasmeen has more energy than a young colt.” He affixed her with his eagle-like gaze. “So, Dr. Cait, you still plan to leave tomorrow?”

“Yes, if I can prevail upon you to fly me out in the morning.”

“I’ll call the plane back from Kabul. But perhaps I can persuade you to stay another day. My granddaughter is going to miss you.”

“I’ll miss her, too. But my mind is set on my research. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to start packing.”

“Before you go to your room, I have something to show you that may be of interest.”

He patted his shirt like an absent-minded professor, pulled some four-by-five inch photographs out of his pocket and handed them over.

Cait fanned the photos out on the table top.

“This picture shows an ancient bread mold,” she said. “This looks like a baking oven. This photo shows ash from a fire. This oval piece is a stone name seal.” She looked up from the pile. “Where were these pictures taken, Amir?”

“The objects were found at some ruins not far from the village.”

He slid more pictures across the table. Cait studied the images. Most people would have seen only a maze of rectangular pits and open spaces, but in her mind’s eye, Cait saw a caravanserai.

The high walls of the caravan stop enclosed an open space that in ancient times would have been a crowded bazaar ringed by apartments to lodge weary traders, storage space for their precious goods, and stables to house camels and other beasts of burden.

“Who took these?”

“I did. I’m no photographer, as you can see by the poor quality.”

“Where are the objects now?”

“I’ve heard that the provenance of artifacts is important to an archaeologist so I left them in situ until the time the ruins can be examined professionally. I’ve warned the locals to stay away from the site.”

“Where are the ruins in relation to the lake?”

“About twenty miles to the east.”

The site was between Itmud and the Valley of the Dead. Trying to keep excitement from coloring her voice, she said, “I don’t recall you mentioning these ruins before.”

“Forgive me. You seemed to be focused on the old mine near the lake, and I didn’t want to distract you. It’s a shame that you are leaving so soon,” he said with a sigh. “Perhaps you can see the ruins on your next visit. Although to my untrained eye, there is nothing there of any importance.”

Amir did his best to wreath his weathered features in innocence, but it was impossible for him to mask the cunning that lurked behind the intelligent eyes. Cait wasn’t fooled. The Kahn was using the ruins as bait to keep her there.

“Hard to tell much about the site from these photos. It might be a trading post or caravan stop. On the other hand, it might be part of a major settlement.”

“You think that these ruins could be part of an abandoned city?”

“It’s possible. Which is the reason the site is not on the caravan stop map Kurtz found. And if that’s true, they could be an important piece of the Prester John puzzle.”

“In what way, Dr. Cait?” He leaned forward, giving her his full attention.

“This would have been a logical place for the caravan carrying the treasure to have stopped. They would have tried to keep their presence low key, but someone might have made note of their passing through. It might be something as ordinary as a bill for supplies, but it would strengthen the foundation underlying my theory.”

“Then it’s done,” Amir said. “You will visit the ruins tomorrow.”

Cait admired the way the Kahn closed the deal. Her chances of finding evidence of Prester John in one day were slim, but historical research was like plucking at a strand of yarn and unraveling the whole sweater.

“I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble. I know how busy you are.”

“No trouble at all. I shall be away tomorrow. Some of my men will take you there.”

“Thank you.” She smiled. “Any other ruins you have forgotten to tell me about?”

He spread his hands wide, palms up. “The sands are always shifting. One can never know what mystery lies beneath their surface until they reveal themselves.”

“No different than people,” Cait observed.

Amir must have known that he was the target of her wry wit, because he confirmed the accuracy of her comment by widening his lips in a mysterious smile.

The intruders came in the night.

Sutherland had slept a few hours only to wake up before dawn. She got out of bed and shuffled to her office like a sleep-walker, sat at her desk and booted up her computer. No message from Hawkins. She frowned. Then her sleepy eyes snapped open like window shades at the sound of her security alarm.

Bong-bong. Bong-bong.

Her security system was warning that an intruder had entered the motion detection zone. She had installed a camera at each roof corner and another at the old ranch to warn her of Border Patrol raids. The feeds came through on the seventy-two inch television screen mounted on the wall. The ranch camera had picked up the image of shadowy figures emerging from an SUV that was dark-colored, not white and green like Border Patrol vehicles.

And the figures moving toward the house wore black uniforms instead of Border Patrol khaki.

The intruders stirred up every paranoid fear Sutherland had ever encountered. She began to hyperventilate and tremble uncontrollably. Reminding herself that she was not completely defenseless, she began to get control of her emotions and silently scolded herself:

Don’t be a victim. Act.

She reached for the phone, put in a call to 911 and reported that she had seen prowlers around the house.

“Illegals?” the dispatcher said.

“I don’t know. It’s dark.”

“I’ll call the Border Patrol and send a cruiser.”

“How long?”

“Soon as possible. Keep your doors and windows locked.”

Sutherland frowned at the lame advice and hung up. It would take at least fifteen minutes for anyone to reach her remote house, and during that time she would be on her own.

She looked at the monitor again. The intruders were close enough to be picked up by a camera on the front of the roof. They were approaching the electrified fence around the house. The power running through the wire strands would only give a small jolt if touched. She hadn’t wanted the bodies of dead illegal immigrants or wildlife piling up outside the fence. But she had installed a switch that would allow her to ramp up power to deadly levels.

The figures were standing in a line in front of the fence, looking at the house. There were six of them, and they were carrying long-barreled weapons. One approached the fence. She increased the power level and an instant later saw a flash of light, like an insect hitting a bug zapper.

An outside microphone picked up a yell of pain. She dampened the power down until the figure fell away from the fence, then she increased it to near lethal levels again.

A couple of the intruders grabbed the limp form of the failed fence-climber and dragged it back down the trail leading to the ranch. She saw the figures get into the SUV. Then the headlights flashed on and the vehicle began to climb to the house. Moving fast.

The electronic barrier wasn’t built to withstand a battering ram on wheels. The SUV crashed through the fence in a shower of sparks and slammed into the front door smashing it to splinters.

She snatched up her laptop, shoved it into a rucksack, raced down the hall and ducked into a walk-in closet. She shoved aside the hanging clothes and pushed a hidden wall button. A two-foot-wide section of shoe shelves slid open and a light switch went on automatically. She slipped through the opening into a small room and bolted the door.

Sutherland had installed the room after seeing Jody Foster fend off a gang of home invaders in the movie Panic Room. The chamber had eight-inch-thick steel-reinforced concrete walls, a first aid kit, food and water, a phone, cot and porta-potty. There was a chest with fresh sets of clothing and underwear.

She whipped off her pajamas and changed into jeans and sweat-shirt, keeping her eyes glued to the television screen that connected the room to cameras inside the house.

Masked figures in Ninja type uniforms burst into the house over the wreckage of the shattered front door. Caps were pulled down over their heads. The intruders searched every room, communicating with military hand signals. When they didn’t find her, they gathered in the studio.

She grabbed a phone from its wall hanger and called 911 again.

The dispatcher’s neutral voice said, “Hold on. A unit is on its way.”

“Tell them to watch their ass. These guys have guns.”

“What—?”

She clicked off and turned back to the screen. She guessed that the fence jumper must still be recuperating from shock because there were only five figures. One apparently noticed the camera high in a corner. He stared at it for a few seconds and pulled his scarf away from his lower face. There was something strangely familiar about the lopsided mouth and the yellow-toothed grin.

No. It couldn’t be.

The man picked up her new painting of the hummingbird from the easel. He stepped nearer the camera, drew his arm back and punched a ragged hole in the canvas with his gloved fist. He looked at the camera again, as if daring her to come out of hiding to save her precious art work. She watched, frustrated and angry, as the other intruders ruined paintings with fists or knives and threw them into a heap.

The leader poured the contents of a can of paint thinner on the pile. He produced a lighter and snapped the flame on. He moved the lighter back and forth near the paintings, smiling all the while at the camera.

Then he touched the lighter to the pile which burst immediately into flames.

Sutherland shrieked in a voice that was part sob and part a scream of rage.

They’re burning my art.

But there was nothing she could do except watch as greasy smoke filled the room and the flames spread to the curtains and consumed the easel and palette table. The intruders hastily exited the burning house.

Choking fumes were seeping into the safe room.

Sutherland hit the kill switch for the ventilation system and tried to decide what to do. Maybe the room would be safe from the fire. Maybe it wouldn’t be. She wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

She grabbed a flashlight from a wall bracket, then bent over and lifted a ring on the floor of the room, opening a rectangular hatch. A short stairway led down into a tight space.

A musty smell greeted her when she unlocked a steel door that guarded a tunnel. She took a deep breath and crawled fifty feet into the tunnel to another steel door, which she pushed open, emerging into another small space.

She groped for a handle above her head, found it, pushed open a hatch cover, and climbed out of the tunnel into the pump house located on the other side of the fence.

The flashlight beam played on the shiny black paint and gold scrollwork of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle resting on its kick stand next to the pump. As a young woman, she had ridden bikes back in West Virginia, and had become pretty good at it. She used her mustering out pay to buy the customized Forty-Eight model Harley. The low-slung motorcycle was built for speed rather than comfort, but she liked the retro design, low profile and the kick from its 1203-cc V-twin engine.

She slipped into leather boots and pulled on a light black leather jacket from a locker, then opened the pump house door a few inches. She let out a soft cry. Her dream house was fully enveloped in fire and her RAV4 had been torched as well. Dark figures moved against the flaming backdrop.

She had intended to wait out the intruders, but one figure had broken away from the group and was walking toward the pump house. She’d be trapped.

She swung a leg over the seat of the Harley and hit the starter. The distinctive guttural roar of the motor was ear-shattering in the close confines of the pump house and the exhaust fumes filled her nostrils. She flicked the headlight on and twisted the handle grip. The bike leaped forward and the front tire knocked the door wide open.

She popped out and headed straight for the figure in black twenty feet away. She aimed right for his crotch. He stepped aside in panic, avoiding the oncoming Harley, but Sutherland heard a satisfying yelp of pain when the handlebar slapped his mid-section.

She held the handlebars tight to keep from losing control and gunned the engine, steering to the top of the long dirt driveway that led to the road. She could feel the heat from the blaze and heard what sounded like corn popping. Gunshots. She snapped her lights off, but knew that she was still a clear target in the light of the flames. She ducked her head low over the handlebars.

Sutherland knew every turn in the driveway and made it down to the road in seconds. The bike gained speed, flying along the winding country road at nearly seventy miles an hour. She slowed at the highway on-ramp, unsure whether to head north or south.

A line of blinking lights could be seen headed south from the direction of Green Valley. The police must have called in reinforcements. She killed the Harley’s lights and pulled off the road.

Two police cars and a border patrol SUV went racing by. She rode out onto the highway heading south. The cool desert air felt good on her heated forehead. She was pushing the bike at the top of its limits, when it dawned on her that she had no idea where she was going. Ahead of her was the Mexican border. Nogales. Back the other way was Phoenix.

After riding a few more miles she turned off the highway and headed southeast.

When she arrived in Tombstone, the tourists were still in bed and it was too early for the stage coach rides or the reenactment of the gunfight at the OK Corral site. She passed the office of the Tombstone Epitaph, and cruised past the old brothel and gambling house known as the Bird Cage back in Wyatt Earp’s day. The rumble of the motorcycle exhaust echoed off the false-front old buildings.

A coffee shop was opening its doors. Inside were a couple of people in 1800s costumes who worked for the western shows. No one seemed bothered by the young woman biker with the dirty face and the wild look in her eyes. She cleaned the dirt off her pudgy cheeks and her hands in the bathroom and when she came out, bought a large coffee and blueberry muffin. She felt better after a few sips of coffee. But she was still in shock over the destruction of her house.

It was no coincidence that the attack came within twenty-four hours of her internet fishing expedition.

She remembered the squared mouth and gapped front teeth of the leader as he prepared to destroy the first painting. He had deliberately exposed his face.

As impossible as it seemed, she had to accept the evidence of her own eyes.

This was not the first time the gapped-toothed man had violated her.

A glazed expression came to her eyes.

Someone was going to pay for this.

And she knew exactly who it would be.

The river bed wasn’t quite the superhighway Rashid had described.

The pock-marked wash wound its way between lofty red cliffs and a steep rock-studded ridge. It was paved with loose stones for several miles before the old river bottom turned to sand and gravel. Calvin was eager to use the extra horsepower he had added to the DPV’s engine. When the wheels rolled onto the smoother surface, he kicked the vehicle up to a higher speed.

His lead foot almost caused a disaster.

The vehicle skittered around a blind curve. A boulder that had broken off from the cliffs lay directly in the buggy’s path. The rock was about six feet across and stuck out only a foot or so from the ground. It was shaped like an iceberg, with a sharp peak at the top that could have easily ripped through the vehicle’s underside.

The DPV was going too fast to stop. Calvin jerked the steering wheel in a half turn then yanked it back the other way to keep from smashing into an even bigger rock. The vehicle was top-heavy from the weight of equipment and passengers but somehow defied the laws of physics and stayed upright throughout the tight S-turn.

Calvin mashed the brake pedal and brought the vehicle to a halt. He glanced in his rear-view mirror. Hawkins and Abby were still perched on top of the submersible. They would have been thrown from the vehicle if Hawkins had not tied a nylon rope around the cargo rack for a hand hold.

“Sorry about the slalom run,” Calvin said. “Everyone okay back there?”

Hawkins rubbed his neck. “Nothing like whiplash to get the blood rushing. Yeah, I’m fine. How about you, Abby?”

Abby removed her baseball cap. Wild strands of hair dangled over her forehead. She swore with the gusto of an angry pirate and slapped the cap against her knee, sending up a cloud of dust that triggered a coughing fit.

Hawkins handed her a canteen. “I’ll translate Abby’s answer, Cal. She wants to say how happy she is to have ignored my advice and volunteered for this mission.”

Abby gulped down water and then thrust the canteen back.

“Screw you, Hawkins!”

Her abrupt answer triggered another round of coughing. Hawkins handed back the canteen and advised everyone to take a stretch. He slipped off the back of the vehicle, used the “do-rag” around his head to wipe the dust from his eyes and checked the bungee straps holding the submersible in place. Fido seemed happily nestled in its bed of plastic foam.

Hawkins craned his neck to examine the face of the hill across from the cliffs. It was around eighty feet high, rising at a forty-five degree angle from the river bed. He asked Calvin to keep an eye on the vehicle, giving an almost imperceptible jerk of his head toward Rashid who sat on the ground with his back to a tire, lighting a cigarette.

“Let’s go for a walk, Abby.”

Hawkins went to the base of the slope, wrapped his hands around a rocky knob, stuck his toe into a horizontal crack in the rock face and began to climb up the steep hill. The bolts that held his shattered left leg together worked well enough, but his joints tended toward stiffness, even in the dry Afghan climate. The cuts on his hand were healing but his palm was still tender.

He could have sent Calvin up the hill, but he didn’t want to admit to the slightest weakness, especially in front of Abby. He took his time, and although his progress was neither fast nor graceful, it was steady.

Abby had competition knotted into every strand of her DNA. She’d excelled in school sports, including traditional male ones like hockey, and had racked up an impressive record as an honor roll student. She continued to strive for first place as she blazed her way through Annapolis, and quickly advanced through the naval ranks after graduation. So it was natural for her to attempt to catch up with Hawkins and beat him to the top of the ridge.

She placed her right foot firmly on a rock outcropping, intending to use the hard muscles of her thigh to vault her body and outstretched arm closer to a hand-hold that was at the extreme end of her reach. She would have floated up the side of the steep hill like a milkweed seed if she had not glanced up at Hawkins.

His right leg and arms were strong, but the injuries to his left leg put him at a disadvantage. When his left foot slipped off a rock the stiffness in his leg prevented him from a quick save. He lost his footing, and dug his fingers into the gravel. Only a Herculean effort prevented him from slipping back down to Abby’s level.

She stopped climbing and held her breath as she watched Hawkins pull himself higher, remembering his steely determination when he was recovering from his physical and psychological wounds. There was no self-pity, but she had been hurt by his refusal to ask for her help. She realized later that what he really needed was not a helping hand, but understanding. When he’d unleashed his anger against the navy, she went on the defensive. After all, she was facing difficulties enough as a woman in the navy and didn’t need a husband attacking the institution that was going to be her life.

Only after their divorce and her decision to leave the navy could she admit to herself that she simply wasn’t there for him in his time of need. That’s why she wasn’t quitting on him now. She’d been kidding herself, saying that she had signed on to cure Matt of his obsession, but the real reason, despite her disclaimer on the flight from the U.S.A., was to expunge her guilt. She was in this mission to the very end.

She saw that Matt had almost reached the top of the ridge. She took a deep breath and began to climb.

Hawkins helped her up the last few feet. Abby puffed out her cheeks and leaned on his shoulder.

“You’re a hard act to follow.”

Hawkins knew the gesture and comment were subtle attempts to cloak his obvious physical limitations. He didn’t know whether to be angry or pleased, so he changed the subject.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” he said.

“That’s an understatement. It looks so….tortured.”

The satellite photos and the contour lines on the chart hadn’t done the surrounding countryside justice. The cool air was clear as fine crystal and as far as the eye could see, the landscape was creased and furrowed with ravines and gullies. In the distance, painfully sharp peaks raked the clear blue sky.

Abby said in an awestruck voice, “I think the chopper made a mistake and landed us on Mars.”

“We’re looking at what happens when continents collide. You get jumbled up pieces of tectonic crust separated by fault zones. The bedrock under Afghanistan is like a big jigsaw puzzle.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You never cease to impress, Hawkins. Was geology part of your SEAL training?”

“Survival was. If you plan to stay alive in unfriendly country it helps to know the territory above and below the surface, especially if you’re chasing the bad guys in tunnels and caves.” He turned away from the panorama and looked into her face. “Sorry about the translation wisecrack, Abby.”

“Don’t be. I’m a big girl and shouldn’t be whining because my hair gets all mussed up.”

“Your hair looks fine. Just to set the record straight, and for what it’s worth, I’m glad you came along.”

“Coming from you, it’s worth a lot.” She glanced down the hill at Rashid. “Can’t say the same for Ali Babba down there. Guy’s creepy smile gives me the shivers.”

Hawkins too had taken an instinctive dislike of Rashid. The guide’s sly expression and fawning manner made Hawkins uneasy, but he had said nothing because as the leader of the mission he had to support unit cohesion.

“So he’s not exactly Mr. Personality, but he was right about the old river bed,” he said with a sweep of his arm. “If we had tried to go cross-country we’d have fallen into a deep hole.”

“This isn’t much better,” Abby grumbled.

“In my experience, there’s no beating first-hand knowledge.”

He started to make his way down the hill with Abby following. Back on level ground, they went over to where Calvin was leaning against the desert vehicle.

“How far have we gone, Cal?”

“Around eight miles from the LZ. Pitiful.”

“Two and a half miles an hour isn’t going to get us far,” Hawkins said. “Let’s light a fire under our rent-a-guide.” He walked around the vehicle. “Looks like you were right about the river bed being the only way to go, Rashid.”

The Afghan spread his lips in an I-told-you-so smile and went to light another cigarette, but Hawkins took the pack from his hand and tucked it back into Rashid’s vest pocket. The guide’s surprised expression turned to a glower when Hawkins ordered him to give up his seat to Abby and sit on the back.

“I can direct the way better from the front.”

Hawkins pointed out that since the river bed was the only navigable route, there was no need to sit up front. “I’ll keep you company,” he offered.

Rashid made no further protest, but Hawkins noticed the fleeting expression of hatred in the man’s eyes. All the more reason to keep close watch on him.

They started off again. Miraculously, the road improved after a mile or so. Fewer boulders blocked their path, and those they did encounter were smaller. Sand had washed down from the cliffs and covered most of the obstacles.

Calvin cautiously picked up speed. The DPV flew along at around forty miles per hour, but that ended when Calvin shouted a warning.

“Everybody hold on!”

He touched the brakes to avoid throwing the vehicle into a spin and brought them to a skidding stop. Hawkins slid off the back of the vehicle. He came around to the front and saw that a massive section of cliff had fallen into the riverbed forming a twenty-foot landslide of earth and rocks that blocked their way as effectively as a castle wall.

Hawkins turned to Rashid who had also dismounted to see why they were stopped.

“Our super highway could use some maintenance work,” Hawkins said.

“This is new since I was here,” Rashid said. He sounded genuinely nonplussed.

“How long ago was that, Rash?” Calvin said in his slow, Louisiana drawl.

“Maybe ten years,” Rashid said.

“You know another way out of here?” Hawkins said.

Rashid answered with a vigorous shake of his bald head. “We have to turn around.”

Abby batted Hawkins’ earlier words back at him, “Like they say, there’s nothing like local know-how.”

Hawkins shrugged. “Actually, sometimes there is something better.”

He removed the GPS unit from its dashboard holder and retrieved the topographical map that had been tucked in between the front seats. The GPS had been developed for the U.S. military. Unlike the commercial sets available in any electronics store, the GPS did not display a map, nor did it have a woman’s voice telling the driver when to turn. It was used to plot how to get to grid locations on a separate paper map.

Hawkins unrolled the map and spread it out on the engine compartment. The combination map and satellite photo showed the meandering river bed had once been fed by a number of tributaries.

“This is a dendritic river drainage system,” Hawkins said. “It’s fed by all these tributaries that look like the branches of a tree. We’re on one of these feeders now. If we get off this riverbed, and connect with another branch we can follow it to the trunk of the tree, which is the main river and leads into the flood plain where the lake is located.”

Abby swept her arm around in an arc. “Too bad we can’t fly out of here.”

“You were in the regular navy too long, Abby. We SEALs don’t see problems. We see challenges. Isn’t that right, Cal?”

“Bigger the better, Hawk.” He wrinkled his brow. “So what are we going to do, man?”

Hawkins shook his head. “Damned if I know.”

Seeing she was being taken for a ride, Abby said, “This is great. Stuck out here in the wilds of Afghanistan with an all-boy act from Comedy Central.” She spun on her heel. “I’m going to have breakfast. You two geniuses can let me know when you figure it out. Hopefully, before it gets dark.”

She brushed by Rashid, got back into the dune buggy and started munching on a power bar.

“Lady’s got a point,” Calvin said.

“She doesn’t understand that our boyish bantering has a purpose.”

“Yeah. Gives us some stall time while we figure things out.”

“Exactly.”

Hawkins reached for the nylon line on the back of the desert vehicle. He started to wind it into a butterfly coil that could be carried hands-free. Calvin guessed what Hawkins had in mind. The two men had worked as a team so many times that they knew instinctively what the other was thinking and had an iron-bound trust in each other’s judgment. They could joke about their situation because he knew, from past experience, that they would always come up with a solution. The scheme might be shaky, hastily improvised, risky and heavily dependent on good fortune, but at least it would be a plan.

Hawkins pointed to the hill. “I’d appreciate it if you could do the honors, Cal. We gimps don’t do well on near vertical surfaces.”

Cal took the coiled rope and tied the free ends around his body like the straps of a backpack. He scaled the hillside and disappeared over the top of the ridge, then popped out again. He waved down and called Hawkins on the hand radio,

“Looks like a go.”

Hawkins got in the desert vehicle and drove it to face the slope. He got out and Calvin tossed the rope down. He tied the line to a loop in the Kevlar cable wound around a motorized drum on the front of the dune buggy, and then worked the winch controls. As the drum turned, Calvin pulled the cable up by the rope and vanished over the ridge a second time. He reappeared and called down on the radio.

“Ready, Hawk.”

Hawkins turned to Abby, who was still in the passenger seat. “You may want to get out of the buggy.”

She stared at Hawkins. “You’re not really going to try this.”

“We have no choice, Abby. It will be dark in a few hours. Our mission is to find the treasure. Going back is not an option.”

Abby had often seen the stubborn set of Hawkins’ jaw when they were still man and wife. Any attempt to dissuade him would be like waving a feather at a charging bull.

Hawkins got in the driver’s seat, started the engine, threw the transmission into neutral, beeped the horn once to give Calvin a head’s up, and activated the winch.

The front wheels rose a few inches off the ground. When the tires were about a foot in the air, he gave the winch more power. The wheels touched the side of slope and began to climb. Soon, the rear wheels were on the rock as well.

Hawkins kept a tight grip on the steering wheel, shifted into low and applied enough pressure to the accelerator to take the strain off the cable. The vehicle proceeded to inch its way up the slope, getting delayed only once when it got hung up on a half-buried rock, and twenty minutes later it was resting on top of the ridge. Hawkins got out and Calvin slapped him on the back.

“Well done, Hawk. Didn’t know if she was going to make it.”

Hawkins grunted his thanks and walked across to the other side of the ridge past the tall boulder used to anchor the cable. The rocky ground sloped down at a gradual angle for several hundred feet to a dry stream bed about half the size of the one they had been on. But clear of rock slides.

Calvin tossed the nylon line down to Abby. She handed the free end to Rashid, told him to tie it round his chest and to start climbing.

“I can’t do it,” he said.

“You have to do it or I’ll leave you here alone,” she said.

“But I’m your guide. You can’t leave me.”

“Try me,” she said, reaching for the line.

He saw that she was serious and wrapped the rope around his chest. He began to climb, only to lose his balance. The men at the other end of the rope had no choice but to drag him up the hill on his belly.

The rope came down again. Abby held onto it and expertly walked her way up. She took a perverse pleasure seeing the front of Rashid’s clothes were torn and soiled with dirt.

She grinned at the scowling guide. “I told you that you could do it.”

She went over to where Hawkins stood, peering through a pair of binoculars.

“Pardon me for doubting you,” Abby said. “You were great.”

Hawkins handed over his glasses. “That may have been the easy part. The area we saw on the map looks a little different up close and personal.”

Abby raised the binoculars and her eyes swept the parched maze of deep fissures and gullies spread out before them.

“Dear God,” she whispered. “This must rank with the worst places in the world.”

He put his arm around her and said, “Look on the bright side.”

“What bright side?”

“At least there won’t be any traffic jams.”

Hawkins was forced to eat his words as their journey progressed. There was no traffic, but they had to navigate a bewildering labyrinth of intersecting gullies and washes that ate up precious time.

“Damn!” Abby said. “I’m starting to feel like a lab rat in a maze!”

“You just read my mind.” Hawkins had taken over the driving while Abby navigated. He steered around a pothole big enough to swallow the city of Chicago.

The corners of Abby’s lush mouth tweaked up in a bemused smile. “My psychic talents must be a hold-over from our married days.”

“You could actually read my mind back then?”

“It’s a talent wives develop. They can read their husbands like a book.”

“My mind must have been like a Stephen King novel. Hope I didn’t give you any nightmares.”

“God, no, Matt! That was the problem. Toward the end, I never knew what you were thinking.”

“Neither did I.”

It was dusk when they popped out of the maze two hours later.

They exited the river system and were at the edge of the coastal plain. Hawkins called a halt among a cluster of car-size boulders that would shield the light from their campfire and offer a good defensive position if necessary. He inspected the vehicle’s side and rear racks. Some of the containers had shifted position from the constant jostling.

“We’ll stay here for the night and move out at dawn,” Hawkins said. “What’s the quartermaster serving for dinner?”

“We are in for a treat, monsieur,” Calvin said.

He opened a box labeled Meal, Ready-To Eat, the operational food ration for the U.S. military, and passed out the packages inside. The MREs were warmed up in water-activated flameless heaters. Soon the fragrance of beef stew and spaghetti floated on the night air. There was little conversation as the famished travelers devoured their dinner.

Rashid sat apart from the others. As he ate his dinner he thought about how he would carry out his assignment. He had deliberately led the group into the river bed, thinking that it would be a good place to kill his companions and dispose of their bodies. He had their trust initially, but their mocking tone showed that they were more wary of him now.

He burned with a simmering anger that could only be extinguished by killing the two men. The hell with Murphy’s order to make Abby’s death a quick one. He would take his time with the woman, before putting an end to her life, too. His anger was stoked as he listened to their murmurings and laughter, adding fuel to the fire burning in his gut and loins.

Hawkins broke away from the others, who split up and disappeared between boulders on opposite sides of the campfire. He came over and said, “We’re organizing the watch, and could use your help, Rashid. Calvin and Abby will take the first two-hour shift while we get some rest. Then it’ll be our turn.”

Rashid could have shouted with joy. They thought he was simply an incompetent guide. Soon they would learn he was a competent assassin.

“Yes, of course,” Rashid said. “I would be glad to help. Perhaps I can make amends for my errors.”

“No hard feelings, Rashid. An op wouldn’t be an op if something didn’t go wrong.”

Hawkins had to move some of the supplies off the cargo racks to get at the sleeping bags. He stacked them neatly in a pile, planning to reload the buggy in daylight. He came back and tossed a sleeping bag to Rashid. Then he stretched another bag on the ground near the fire, zipped himself into it and was soon fast asleep.

When Abby’s shift was over, she tapped Hawkins on the shoulder to wake him up. He crawled out into the cold night air. She slid into the sleeping bag.

“Thanks for warming it up for me, Matt.” She zipped it shut and closed her eyes.

Calvin roused Rashid and took his place in the bag. “See you in two hours,” he said.

Hawkins walked around a boulder and told Rashid to keep his eyes open and his ears cocked. He gave him a light stick and told him to wave it if he needed help. Then he walked back to where Abby had been standing watch. He found a rock roughly the size and shape of a sofa to lean against. It was better than standing, but not so comfortable that he would fall asleep on it.

His thick mane of hair was no match for the cold. He pulled a woolen cap down on his head. The stars were popping out of the heavens like rhinestones on velvet. He used to call the sight Broadway Sky back in his navy days. He always had a hard time reconciling the celestial beauty above his head with the death and destruction on earth.

He began to work out the plans for the next day. They would get underway at first light and should make it to the shores of the lake by mid-day. They would send the submersible down to sniff around, and follow up with a dive the next morning.

The following day they would come home, treasure or not.

A half hour passed and he saw a luminescent blue blur. Rashid had cracked the light stick and was waving it.

Hawkins blinked his flashlight and started toward the guide’s position, walking in a wide circle around the sleeping bags so as not to disturb their occupants.

As he neared the guide, Hawkins whispered, “What’s up, Rashid?”

“I thought I heard something moving.”

Hawkins guessed that the guide had been spooked by a rabbit, but he drew his pistol, stepped past him and squinted into the darkness, his ears attuned to the slightest sound. He heard nothing. Not even the buzz of insects.

“Where?” he said.

“Off to the left,” the guide’s voice rasped in his ear. “There it is. Again. Closer.”

Hawkins leaned slightly forward and moved his finger onto the trigger.

“I don’t—”

Something hard slammed into the right side of his head and a nova blossomed before his eyes. The blow might have killed him if it had not been softened by the wool cap and if he had not shifted position a second before he was struck. As he sank to his knees he heard a loud explosion and his arm jerked backwards.

He blacked out, but the shards of pain stabbing his head shocked him back to consciousness. He heard Calvin, then Abby’s voice sounding as if their mouths were full of cotton. He opened his eyes and saw a pale oval that transformed into Abby’s face as his vision cleared. She was cradling his head in her lap.

“Matt. Are you all right? Talk to me, for godsakes!”

Hawkins reached up and removed the cap. His fingers slightly touched the tender skin and his skull felt as if it was cracked. He struggled to sit up.

“Feels like someone dropped a house on my head, but I’m okay. Rashid sucker-punched me with a rock. Where is the sneaky bastard?”

“Gone. Cal’s after him.”

They whirled at the sound of the DPV’s engine turning over and barking into life, followed by gunshots. Then came the whine of spinning tires and the engine noise began to recede.

A flashlight bobbed in the darkness and footsteps pounded toward them.

“Sonofabitch stole the buggy!” Calvin shouted with breathless anger. “Fired in the air, but he kept on going. You okay, Hawk?”

“Nothing a new skull wouldn’t cure.”

Calvin and Abby helped him to his feet where he stood on shaky legs. He was angry for not following his instincts where Rashid was concerned. The guide had taken off with the submersible and dive gear, most of their survival equipment and a cache of weapons.

“How did you know I was in trouble?” he said.

Abby handed him his pistol. “We heard a shot and came running. I found this on the ground.”

She handed over his pistol. The barrel was still warm.

“I must have fired it by accident. Damn. I don’t look forward to telling the navy that their million dollar submersible got ripped off.”

“Cheer up, Hawk, They’ll never believe you.”

“Did he get the satellite phone?”

“Yep. On the buggy.”

“Then that’s where we’ll go. After Rashid. The DPV’s tire tracks will lead us right to him.”

“He’s got a huge head start on us, and spare cans of fuel to keep him going,” Abby said. “We’ll never catch up with him.”

“Never say never,” Hawkins said. He led them to the supplies he’d stacked earlier and showed them the fuel containers.

Calvin laughed. “Rashid’s going to be pissed when he runs out of gas.”

“He’s still got enough fuel to put some miles between us. He’ll expect us to wait until light to get moving, but we’ll leave now.”

Abby said, “You need some first aid before we go anywhere, Matt.”

The first aid consisted of a couple of aspirin, a compress to hold the swelling down and a bandage and tape. While Abby nursed Hawkins, Calvin packed water, food and weapons. They walked to the edge of the campsite where the dune buggy had been parked, and began to follow the faint tread marks in the rocky soil.

Cait was much too excited to sleep. She woke up an hour before dawn, showered and got dressed in a long-sleeve tan cotton shirt, matching cargo slacks and hiking boots. Then she inventoried the contents of her duffle bag to make sure she had her digital camera, flashlight, batteries and notebook. She followed the scent of coffee through the quiet house to the kitchen. There was a fresh pot on the stove and a plate of pastry on the table. Leaning on the plate was an envelope with her name written on it. The note inside said:

She tucked the folded note into her shirt pocket. Amir might be a drug lord, but the old rogue was a considerate host. After a quick breakfast of coffee and pastry, Cait filled a couple of canteens with cold water and went back to her room to collect the duffle. She pulled on a wind-breaker, tucked her hair under a Georgetown University baseball cap and stepped out the front door to wait for her ride.

It was still dark outside, and the temperature was in the forties, although once the sun rose, its heat would quickly vanquish the lingering cold of the night. The village was stirring with life. A pair of operatic roosters had begun a duet, setting off a chain reaction of barking dogs that triggered a wailing chorus of hungry babies.

The guttural rumble of a powerful engine echoed off the walls of the closely-built houses, drowning out the morning concert. Amir’s Cadillac touring car drove up to the front of the house and stopped at Cait’s feet.

The car’s canvas top was folded down despite the cool air. Two bearded men sat in the front seat of the seven-passenger car. The driver was one of Amir’s top lieutenants. His name was Ghatool which meant tulip in Pashto, but with his squat, troll-like physique, fierce beard and hard eyes, he was as unlike a flower as anyone could be.

The name would have more suited the handsome young man who sat in the passenger seat, his hand clutching a rifle. His name was Baht and despite his movie star good looks, his delicate features could not disguise the Afghan toughness that comes from growing up in an environment that punishes weakness.

Baht got out of the car, still holding his rifle and stored her bag in the car’s trunk. Then he motioned for her to get in back and resumed his seat riding shotgun. Moments later, the car passed through the gates of the compound. The Cadillac’s headlights stabbed the inky darkness as the car sped along the road between Amir’s agricultural fields, then into open country, maintaining a steady pace for around fifteen minutes until it slowed to turn off onto a rutted track.

As she rode in the back seat with the air blowing in her face, Cait felt like an Oriental potentate off to inspect her vast holdings. She thought it interesting that Amir had assigned his most trusted men to the routine errand of taking his guest to visit the ruins. The gesture reaffirmed the tie that had developed since she had saved the warlord’s granddaughter from choking.

The stars faded from the heavens as a golden eye peeked between gaps in the shark-tooth mountain range and the sky shifted to purple and blue. Once the sun rose above the peaks, it was as if a thousand flood lamps had been switched on.

Cait slipped on her sunglasses and took in the passing scenery. They had left the relatively flat lands of the flood plain behind and the track threaded its way through a series of linked valleys that separated low hills covered with scrub brush. The big balloon tires allowed the Cadillac to move with relative ease over the uneven ground.

Ghatool eased off the gas pedal as they rounded a bend and pointed through the windshield.

“Look, Dr. Cait.”

It would have been impossible to miss the high crenellated walls of the citadel that rose from the earth about a quarter mile ahead. Ghatool stopped the car and they all got out. Ghatool knelt on one knee and scraped away a patch of dirt. Cait bent close to look at what he was uncovering and saw pavement stones close together.

“A road!” she said.

“Yes, yes. A road.” He stood, bared his horse-toothed grin and extended his arms. “Wide.”

Cait walked to her right until she came to the edge of the paving and did the same thing to her left. The roadway would have been at least twenty feet wide.

“Very wide,” she said. She walked a short distance further where the ground sloped down to a dry wash that ran more or less parallel to the road and past the ruins.

Ghatool made a motion as if he were drinking.

“Water,” Cait said. “A river.”

It made perfect sense. The ancient settlements along the Silk Road were usually situated near springs or a river. Ghatool nodded and said something in Pashto to his friend, who smiled and gave Cait a thumb’s up. They got back in the car and drove toward the high arched gate, unaware that they were being closely watched by unfriendly eyes.

Rashid lay on his belly behind a bush on the opposite side of the wash, peering through a pair of Steiner navy SEAL binoculars he had found in Calvin’s stash. He focused the lenses on the two men, pausing to let his gaze linger on their weapons, and then moved on to Cait, taking in her easy, feminine stride.

Rashid seethed with anger for botching the attempt to murder Hawkins and his friends. He had planned to incapacitate Hawkins with a blow to the head and silently dispatch him with a knife. Then he’d kill the sleeping Calvin and deal with Abby. He had looked forward to hearing the insolent woman beg for her life before he killed her. The theft of the dune buggy and its valuable cargo had assuaged his rage, that is, until the vehicle ran out of gas.

He couldn’t believe the turn his luck had taken. The touring car was a gift from God, he thought. He spread his thick lips in a yellow-tooth smile. He crawled backwards until he was sure he couldn’t be seen, then rose to his feet and walked over to the dune buggy, which was hidden behind a cluster of rocks.

His original plan after killing Hawkins and his friends was to head for a village where he could sell his stolen goods. When he’d run out of gas, he had gathered up water and food and struck out on foot through the rugged countryside, pondering his dim prospects with each step, until he heard the sound of a car engine. He ducked behind a rock and saw the Cadillac pass by. He had followed the touring car on a parallel path, keeping out of view, until they came to the ruins.

Rashid had little interest in a bunch of old stones. He stowed the binoculars and pulled out Calvin’s rifle with the sound suppressor.

He loaded the rifle, tucked a few extra shells in his pocket, and set off on a circuitous route that would take him to the ruins unseen.

Cait asked Ghatool to stop the car so she could use her camera. She stood on her seat and snapped off photos of the fort’s gateway, picturing the image on the cover of the book she was outlining in her head. The title would go under the tall pointed arch of the opening, which had been built twelve feet high to allow for the passage of camels. She’d be sure to include her two colorful companions in the author photo on the back cover.

She finished taking pictures and Ghatool drove through the gateway. In the fort’s heyday, armed guards would have stood at the long-gone wooden gate doors, vetting weary travelers and directing them to the fort keeper who would have assessed them a fee before passing them on to others who would require more payments for lodging and supplies.

The car entered a square courtyard around two hundred feet across. Archways lined three sides of the quadrangle, creating a shaded arcade for vendors to display their wares. Behind some of the galleries would be rooms for travelers and warehouses for their goods. At the center of the open space was a three-story, square building that probably housed the fort keeper and served as an administrative or possibly religious center.

Rather than get into a time-consuming search of the cloisters, Cait decided to concentrate on the building. Ghatool parked near a circular dry fountain around ten feet across. They all got out and Baht retrieved Cait’s duffle bag and slung it onto his shoulder.

He followed Cait who walked around the tower taking photos of every side. The structure was perfectly square. Most of the plaster exterior had fallen off to expose the huge blocks used in construction. There were narrow vertical windows, the frames beveled to allow archers a clear shot in any direction. The windows on the third story were horizontal. She came back to the front of the building and got a flashlight from the duffle.

“I’m going inside to look around,” she said.

Ghatool said something in Pashto to his friend, then he sat down on the short flight of steps that led to the entryway and crossed his rifle across his knees. With Baht leading the way, Cait climbed the steps to the doorway and flicked the flashlight on as she stepped across the threshold into the cool dark interior.

She swept the beam around the room and saw a miniature version of the outside fountain in the center of the chamber. Caravan leaders would be brought in to the reception area to sit around the fountain and refresh themselves while negotiating various fees.

A flight of cleverly-designed winding stone stairs was tucked into a corner. With Baht trailing like a devoted puppy, she climbed the stairway to the second level, which was similar to the first except for the absence of a fountain. She walked around the perimeter, her boots leaving tracks in a layer of dust that looked as if it had been undisturbed for centuries. The chamber would have housed the money-counters and scribes who tallied and recorded the flow of cash that the caravans brought in.

Baht silently watched her, an expression of curiosity on his face.

Cait reached into a pocket then pantomimed dropping imaginary coins into her palm. She described a circle with her index finger.

“Money,” Baht said.

“Yes. Big money.”

“Like Amir.”

She laughed and said, “Yes. Like Amir.”

Another corner stairway led to the third level. The reason for the horizontal windows visible from the outside was to allow space for the walls to be used for display. The openings had been placed so that the shafts of lights coming in from four directions fell on the opposite interior walls.

She stood in the center of the room and pivoted on her heel. What she saw was simply stunning.

She was standing in an ancient map room.

Cait clicked on her flashlight and slowly swept its beam around the room. Her heart ratcheted up several beats. This was not any map, but a detailed rendering, spread out over four panels, of the old Silk routes. The colors had faded through the centuries, but the details were clear.

Like most ancient examples of cartography, the proportions were out of whack, but the shape of the continents was reasonably accurate. The physical features, such as mountains, deserts and rivers, were well represented.

She walked along the walls, tracing the thousands of miles from China to the Holy land. East of China was a sliver of India, and to the west was a blue crescent, representing the eastern corner of the Mediterranean, whose ports were the jump-off for the maritime route to Rome.

The three major routes were marked with a heavy line and the branches in thinner red lines. Only major city names were identified, written in Latin and Chinese. Trading posts were represented by numerous blue dots. Some had palm trees that marked an oasis, or a drawing of a crenellated wall showing the presence of a fortified caravan stop.

The only flaw was a rectangular section of bare stones a couple of feet wide and high between China and Afghanistan. Rows of chisel marks showed that someone had methodically obliterated that part of the map from the record. The floor in front of the marred wall was covered with scattered pieces of plaster.

Cait spent several minutes making a photographic record before she tore herself away from the maps. With Baht following, she climbed to the top of the tower into the blinding sunlight. They were standing on an observation platform that offered views for miles in every direction. Any daylight threat could have been discerned, but more likely it was used to watch for approaching caravans.

As a historian, Cait had long been impressed at the ingenuity of the ancients. Without benefit of computers or powerful machines, they had managed to erect monuments that had stood for hundreds, even thousands of years. But there was another sphere in which the ancients overcame their limitations. She was standing on a formidable example of human cooperation and organization. The tower and the surrounding fortress enabled the existence of an international commercial enterprise. Caravans were tended to and protected, money exchanged, and goods passed across entire continents.

They went back down to the map room and Cait began to take more pictures. Baht cocked his head as if he were listening, and said something in Pashto, but Cait was so absorbed with her task that she only half-heard him before he disappeared down the stairway, leaving her alone. She continued with her work, unaware of the ugly danger that lurked nearby.

Rashid had entered the fort through a breach in a crumbling wall and was standing in the shadows of the arcade behind a stone pillar, where he could see the heavy-set man sitting on a stone bench next to the tower entrance. The man’s rifle rested on his lap and he appeared to be dozing.

Rashid considered his options. If he attempted to cross the courtyard to get to the touring car, the man might wake up or someone inside the tower could see him through a window. He was pondering his move when the woman and the other man popped into view at the top of the tower.

They walked along the side of the observation platform closest to him and disappeared from his line of sight. He gambled that they would stay on the roof for a few moments and brought the rifle to his shoulder. He trained the cross-hairs of the telescopic sight on the sleeping man. He tried for a killing shot to the heart, but in his haste he aimed low.

The gun coughed softly and a millisecond later the man stiffened and his eyes popped open in surprise. His face contorted in pain and he brought his hands to his abdomen.

Rashid cursed. Damn. He’d gut shot his target. He aimed again, but his target stood, took a few steps and turned toward the door. Rashid put a second bullet between the man’s shoulder blades. With superhuman effort, the fatally wounded man managed to call out something before he collapsed and died.

Rashid bided his time until the younger man soon appeared in the doorway, knelt by the dead man’s side, and then looked up, a stricken expression on his face. He swept the courtyard with his eyes, then stood and brought his rifle to his shoulder, searching for a target, unaware that he had already become one. Rashid killed Baht with a single shot to the heart.

As Baht fell on top of his friend, Rashid emerged from hiding and quickly crossed to the tower door. He checked the car and found the keys in the ignition. He could have gotten in the car at that point and driven off, but his blood was up. He stepped over the warm bodies and entered the tower to look for his next victim.

Cait was shooting pictures madly, as if in a trance.

When she had all the photos she needed, she came back to the damaged wall and knelt by the pile of plaster fragments. She got a Coleman LED camp light from her duffle, which Baht had left behind, and began to examine the pieces one-by-one.

Most of the shards were blank or had squiggles representing roads or mountains drawn on them. But then she found one with letters printed on it:

She took her hat off and placed it upside down on the floor to use as a receptacle for other pieces that might have writing on them. She found a few more and guessed that they were place names, but she almost fainted with excitement when she found a fragment that said:

Could it be? She placed the fragments side by side and with her finger drew the missing letters in the dust.

She was staring at the words when she heard a footfall behind her.

Without looking, she said: “Hi Baht. Can you give me a hand with this?”

When there was no answer, she turned her head and saw standing in the dimness not Baht, but a stranger who had a squat physique. He was around six feet away and held a rifle with an oddly-shaped barrel in the crook of his arm.

“Who are you?” Cait said.

“A traveler in need,” said Rashid.

Cait reached for the camp light and slowly got to her feet. She raised the lantern high and in its pale blue light she could see the hungry eyes of a predator staring at her like a lion watching a gazelle. She wondered how this creep got past Baht and Ghatool. A frisson of fear went through her as she realized there was only one way that could have happened.

As if reading her thoughts, the man said, “Both your friends are dead. If you cooperate I may let you live.”

Cait knew exactly what sort of cooperation he had in mind, and her revulsion at the prospect pumped up her courage.

“All right. Just don’t kill me,” she said, having no trouble injecting a nervous tremor into her voice. He took a couple of steps closer. When he got in range, she swung the lantern by its handle, aiming for the head. He was quicker than she expected and fended off the attack with his brawny forearm.

Cait dropped the lantern and tried to duck past him, but his hand shot out with the speed of a striking cobra and he grabbed the back of her shirt and pulled her to him. One arm wrapped around her neck and the other still held his rifle.

She snapped her head back into his nose, eliciting a yell and a satisfying crunch of cartilage, but her triumph was short-lived. He ignored the blood streaming from his ruined nose, spun her around and cuffed her cheek with a bear-like swipe of his open hand.

She was temporarily dazed from the blow and stopped fighting long enough for him to slam her shoulder blades against the wall. Then he reached down to the back of her knees so that she slipped down to a sitting position. The impact knocked the wind out of her. His hands grabbed her ankles and pulled again until she was stretched out on the floor.

Cait’s hand groped along the floor, searching for the flashlight she had placed near the wall, but it found a metal object instead. She wrapped her fingers around the object and brought it up, aiming for her attacker’s eyes. He was too quick, jerking his head back so the sharp end of the metal only raked his cheek. There was a cry of pain and she tried to roll aside and away, but he caught her arm with his left hand and punched her in the jaw, this time using his fist rather than his hand.

Rashid wiped the blood away from his face. His right hand slid along his belt and his fingers closed on the handle of the three-inch knife hidden in the buckle. Cait was dazed but still awake. Her eyes were fixed on the blade. Good, Rashid thought. She will see what is coming. He ripped open the front of her shirt, placed the knife-point above her breasts and moved it back and forth with just enough pressure to draw a bead of blood. Then he froze as he felt a metallic pressure at the base of his skull. A male voice said:

“Fun’s over, Rashid.”

Rashid couldn’t believe his ears.

Hawkins.

“How did you find me?”

“I followed a bad smell. Now get up. Slowly. Hands in the air.”

Hawkins pulled the gun away from Rashid’s skull and stepped back out of reach. Rashid slowly stood, palming the knife as he reached for the ceiling.

“That’s better. Now step aside,” Hawkins ordered.

Rashid did as he was told. He saw Hawkins moving in from the left to tend to the woman. He still had his pistol leveled at Rashid’s mid-section, but he took his eye off the man for a second as he extended his hand toward Cait. Rashid tensed, ready to swivel and slash the short blade across Hawkins’ exposed throat.

Cait’s eyes were open and staring. She yelled a warning.

“He’s got a knife!”

Hawkins saw the glint of metal as the knife began its arc. He fired instinctively without aiming. The bullet shattered Rashid’s sternum and the knife flew from his hand and clattered to the floor. Cait rolled out of the away to avoid the man’s crashing body. She lay on her side, staring at Rashid’s vacant eyes, then with Hawkins’ help, she stood on shaky legs. Hawkins stepped over to examine the dead man so as to give Cait a moment of modesty to reassemble her clothes, then turned back and said:

“Are you okay, Dr. Everson?”

Cait was surprised to hear the man say her name. “Yes. You know me?”

“Only by your work. My name is Matt Hawkins. I stopped by Georgetown hoping to invite you to dinner so we could talk about maritime silk routes. It was quite a surprise to find you here.”

“I’m very glad that you did.”

“Me, too. Now we can talk about that dinner.”

Cait stared at Hawkins. “Dinner,” she said in a dead voice.

“That must sound a bit crazy.”

“A little bit.”

“No rush. I was talking about a future date, and different place, of course.”

She studied the handsome, dark-complexioned face and wondered who this person was who had found her in one of the most remote places on earth, rescued her at risk to his own life, killed a man in the process and asked her out on a date. She realized that his lighthearted patter was aimed at trying to keep her from going into shock.

“You seem to know a lot more about me than I know about you, Mr. Hawkins. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“That’s a long story. I’d be glad to explain after we tend to your injuries.”

“That might be a good idea.” She touched her swollen jaw with her fingers and winced in pain, then glanced at Rashid, who lay face up. “I’m glad you killed that bastard.”

Hawkins would have liked to have kept Rashid alive long enough to find out why he’d tried to kill him, but he couldn’t blame Dr. Everson for her hard feelings.

“From the looks of his face, you got a head start.”

Cait started to reply to his comment, but said instead, “I’m a bit dizzy. Maybe I should get some air.”

Hawkins nodded, and took her by the arm as they made their way down to the first level. Cait gasped when she saw the bodies of Baht and Ghatool lying on the threshold, but Hawkins had more immediate concerns he had to deal with.

As he stepped into the open, he saw Calvin and Abby face down on the courtyard.

The muzzles of six automatic rifles were pointed at his heart.

Just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse, he heard someone bark an order. Hawkins knew enough Pashto to understand the words.

“Kill him!”

Minutes before, Amir had driven though the front gates of the fort behind the wheel of a UAZ-469, the Russian equivalent of the American Jeep. Riding beside him was an armed guard; two more guards sat in the back.

Following close behind and protecting the smaller vehicle, was a BTR-152, a personnel carrier shielded with five tons of armor. Six more guards rode on the open top of the carrier where they were well-positioned to unleash a lethal wave of automatic gunfire in any direction. Both vehicles had been left behind during the Russian army’s retreat from Afghanistan and had been restored to their original condition by the skilled mechanics who kept his fleet of trucks running.

He had wound up his latest negotiating session, with an Iranian middleman, earlier than expected and had decided to surprise Cait and visit her at the ruins. He’d been glad she’d taken his bait and prolonged her stay. His daughter and granddaughter adored her, but he was fond of her as well. Her quick intelligence and pluck reminded him of his late wife, who had attained a college degree despite the odds for an Afghan woman.

The half-grin on his lips as he anticipated her surprise changed to a deep frown when he saw the man and woman standing over the bodies of his men at the entrance of the tower building.

He hit the brakes and got out of the vehicle with amazing agility, despite his age and bad leg. He waved his cane to signal his guards from their vehicles. They went over to the man and relieved him of his weapon. The woman was unarmed. Amir’s men forced the strangers face down onto the ground. Amir warned that they would be shot if they moved and ordered one of his men to check out the bodies. The man confirmed that the dead men were Ghatool and Baht and said they had been shot.

Amir seethed with anger at the murder of his two most trusted men. His unbridled fury was uncharacteristic of the drug lord, who took pride in his coolness. He told four guards to split off from the others and search the arcade. The other guards stood in a line in front of the tower doorway with orders to shoot the first person who emerged.

That’s when Hawkins appeared.

He would have been dead a second later if Cait had not seen Amir and his men and stepped in front of Hawkins.

“Amir. No!”

Amir limped into the line of fire and waved his cane in the air.

“Stop!” he shouted.

There was a moment of bow-string tension as all parties froze in place. Then the guards slowly lowered their guns and Amir strode up to the tower.

“What is going on here, Dr, Cait?” he said.

“This man is a friend, Amir. He saved my life.”

Hawkins gently placed his hand on Cait’s shoulder and thanked her, then moved her aside and stepped out in front.

“And those are my friends,” he said, pointing to Abby and Calvin. “I’d appreciate it if you would allow them to get to their feet.”

Hawkins strode past the drug lord and helped Abby stand while Calvin got up on his own.

“Da-yam, that was close, Hawk!” Calvin said as he brushed the dust off his clothes. He looked over at Cait, who was in conversation with Amir, and said, “Wow! Leave it to you to find a beautiful woman in the middle of nowhere.”

Abby cast an appraising glance in Cait’s direction.

“Wow indeed. Who’s the pretty lady?”

“That’s Cait Everson, the historian who did the research into Prester John that sparked our crazy treasure hunt.”

“What’s she doing in this godforsaken place?”

Hawkins shook his head. “Looks like you’ll have the chance to ask her yourself.”

Cait came toward them, walking arm-in-arm with the older man.

“This is my friend Amir,” she said. “He’s a native of this area who has been helping me with my research.”

Hawkins introduced himself and his friends. Abby winced when she saw Cait’s swollen jaw up close.

“You need some cleaning up,” she said. “I’ve got a make-up kit you can use after I give you some first aid.”

Cait said she would be delighted to accept the offer and the two women walked off, chatting like old friends, leaving Hawkins and Cal with Amir.

“My apologies for the inconvenience.” Amir said. “From what Dr. Cait told me about how you came to her rescue, I realize now that I was under a misapprehension.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Hawkins said in a tone that didn’t match his nonchalance.

Amir picked up on the edge in Hawkins’ voice. “I understand your anger.” There was sadness in his eyes as he watched the bodies of Ghatool and Baht being carried to the armored vehicle. “My judgment was clouded by emotion. I was very fond of those men. They were loyal.”

Amir’s readiness to order him killed signified a flinty hardness of personality, but he was clearly shaken up over the death of his men. Hawkins was intrigued, too, in the way Amir spoke English, with an American accent.

Speaking in Pashto, Hawkins said, “A broken hand can work, but a broken heart can’t.”

Amir’s jaw dropped. It was rare for a westerner to speak Pashto and even more shocking to hear the old Afghan expression of sympathy from the lips of this stranger.

“True, but in this case the hand still has work to do. To begin with, we have much to learn about each other. May I suggest some refreshments?’

The warlord clapped his hands and some of the guards who had been standing around went to the carrier and pulled out a plastic bag and a couple of coolers. Within minutes, the contents of the bag had morphed into an open-sided pavilion. Blankets and cushions were spread out in the shade.

Abby and Cait returned. They had washed the dirt off their faces, and applied touches of make-up that had improved their spirit as well as their appearance.

Amir served plates of cold spiced lamb and rice to his guests, which they washed down with ice tea. Cait chewed slowly, applying a cold pack to her sore jaw in between bites. While they dined, another cooler was passed to the guards, who had taken up stations at the fort’s gate and around the courtyard.

Amir took a last bite, cleaned his fingers with a packaged hand wipe and looked around at the others.

“Now that we have fed our bodies, it is time to feed our souls with stories. Would you be so kind as to go first, Mr. Hawkins?”

Matt had been thinking how he might reply to the question that would inevitably be asked of him. Amir was too sharp to be deceived by fibs, so Hawkins decided to tell the full story, editing it here and there.

He began with a short resume of his stint as a SEAL in Afghanistan. Amir nodded when he learned how Hawkins knew Pashto and proverbs. He sat quietly while Hawkins told how he had been wounded and left the navy to pursue scientific studies. He touched on his work at Woods Hole and said that he had been hired by what he termed as a government group to search for the Prester John treasure in the lake. He explained without going into detail that a terrorist organization wanted the treasure as part of a scheme against America.

“To buy weapons?” Amir said.

“As I understand it, they think the treasure will give them some historical legitimacy in their attacks on the U.S.”

“Are you saying that you can explore the lake waters?” Cait broke in with excitement in her voice.

“We have the equipment that will help us do that. Yes.”

Amir raised his hand off his lap and held it in front of him as a gesture of disbelief.

“You plunged right into this mission without question, apparently,” he said. “Weren’t you skeptical?”

“Yes, I was very skeptical, until the attempt on my life.”

He told how the two men had broken into his house and tried to kill him.

When he described the twin attackers, a gasp came from Cait’s throat. “Those are the same men who tried to kidnap or kill me,” she said. “They are the reason I fled the country and came to Afghanistan.”

“You’re still here Mr. Hawkins, so the assassins must have failed,” Amir said. “What happened?”

“I killed one of them. The other got away.”

Amir mulled the answer for a moment, a slight smile on his lips.

“Go on with your fascinating story,” he said.

Hawkins told how an acquaintance in Kabul had persuaded him to hire Rashid as a guide. He described their journey up to the theft of the desert buggy and the trek through the night to find the vehicle.

“When we arrived at the fort we found the bodies of your men,” Abby explained. “We stayed outside to keep watch and Matt went in to check things out.”

“It’s fortunate for me that he did,” Cait said. “I was so engrossed taking photos in the map room. I wish I had been paying attention, maybe I could have done something.”

“You could do nothing against an armed and ruthless thug,” Amir said. “Tell me, Dr. Cait, what did you think of the map room?”

“It’s wonderful, but I’m puzzled by the vandalism to the map. Who would do such a thing?”

“I had the same thought the first time I saw the room years ago.” He gazed at the tower, a thoughtful expression on his face, then he pushed himself up from the cushion with his cane. “I would like to see this Rashid person.”

“I’ll show you around,” Hawkins volunteered.

“I’m coming with you,” Cait said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said with determination in her voice. “I left my camera and my cap behind.”

Hawkins shrugged and led the way to the tower entrance and up the stairs to the map room.

If the sight of Rashid’s body bothered Cait, she didn’t show it except for a slight wrinkle of her nostrils. Amir picked the knife from off the floor near the corpse. The blade was short but razor-sharp.

“A coward’s weapon,” he said with distain.

He tossed the knife aside, bent over Rashid’s body and brushed away the flies settling on the mouth and lips. “This pig resembles a family of bandits that lives in a village around fifty miles distant. It’s hard to tell, though. I assume you’re responsible to the wounds to his face.”

“No,” Hawkins said. “The credit for those goes to Dr. Everson, who fought him tooth and nail.”

Cait had squatted to retrieve her baseball cap and the plaster fragments. “Not exactly a nail,” she said. She picked up a shiny piece of metal and stood.

“This.”

She was holding a chisel in her hand.

“The mystery of the damaged map is apparently solved,” Amir said. “This tool was used to chop away the missing section.”

“That only solves part of the mystery,” Cait said. “We don’t know why the damage was done or who did it.”

Hawkins asked if he could look at the chisel and held it under the flashlight.

“There are initials here on the shaft. K and an M. Any idea what they might stand for?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t make any sense,” Cait said.

“Give it a try.”

“My guess is that the letters stand for Kurtz Mining. I found similar initials on a timber in a flooded mine shaft his expedition dug to get at the treasure.”

“I read about the Kurtz expedition in your report,” Hawkins said. “Why would he mess up the map?”

Cait held the two shards with the letters on them side by side. “I think the map had the location of Prester John’s kingdom and Kurtz didn’t want anyone else to know where it was. He was sometimes scoffed at for his pursuit of legends. Think of the glory that would come if he discovered the treasure and found Prester John’s kingdom. Maybe even the Prester’s tomb. My guess is that he made a paper map before covering his trail.”

“Seems like a reasonable conclusion,” Hawkins said. “How far is the lake from here?”

“Two hours overland,” Amir said. “I suggest we get moving immediately. How soon can you launch your search?”

“We can set up camp and start exploring the lake this afternoon.”

Cait clapped her hands like a giddy child. “I’ve been waiting years for this moment. What are we waiting for?”

“First, I will have my men remove that animal to the desert where he can feed the vultures,” Amir said. “That will be the end of it.”

“Wait a second,” Hawkins said. He searched Rashid’s jacket and found his missing satellite phone. He cursed when he saw that the bullet that had killed the guide had smashed the phone to pieces.

Amir said, “Don’t worry. I have a satellite phone you can use if you need it.”

As they made their way from the map room, Hawkins glanced once more at Rashid’s body. He didn’t share Amir’s confidence that killing the guide would put an end to it. He wasn’t even sure what it was.

What he was sure of was that Murphy had produced Rashid and vouched for his character. And that Rashid had then tried to kill him.

He had expected that the main obstacle to finding the treasure would be the terrorists’ rival salvage expedition, but it was clear that shadowy forces had tried to put an end to the mission even before he arrived in Afghanistan. And when that failed, they had sent in Rashid as a hit man.

None of it made sense.

His head was spinning.

He remembered the advice Jack Kelly had given him in Newport. His old commanding officer had said:

Never seen it like this, Matt. Real snake pit. Watch your ass and make sure your perimeter is secure.

As Hawkins stepped out into the courtyard behind Amir and Cait, he saw Calvin and Abby chatting like old friends with the guards who had almost killed them.

Hawkins couldn’t wait to get back to Kabul and wrap his hands around Murphy’s throat and shake the truth out of him. He’d ask Sutherland to dig around in the meantime. It was time he brought Sutherland up to date anyhow. He asked Amir if he could borrow his phone and tried Sutherland’s number. There was no answer.

He handed the phone back to Amir. He’d try again later.

No matter how hard he scrubbed, Professor Saleem could not wash the blood from his hands. He tried different solvents and abrasives but the crimson stain persisted. He scrubbed harder. The skin dissolved, then the flesh deteriorated, and he realized to his horror that he was looking at the pure white bones of his fingers and palms.

He awoke with his heart hammering in his chest and his face bathed in a cold sweat. He knew the source of the nightmare. He had gone to sleep thinking of a spirited exchange he had had with his cousin at ISI headquarters in Islamabad over the use of violence by unpredictable men with extremist views as a cat’s paw to accomplish the intelligent service’s goals.

“I agree. This is a foul business,” Cousin Mohamed had said, leaning back in his chair to tent his fingers. “Sometimes we get our hands dirty, but remember that we can always wash them clean.”

“That’s true, cousin, but sometimes the soap can be so strong that it removes the skin,” the professor had rejoined.

The professor checked out his hands and was relieved to see that the flesh was attached to his fingers, then he dozed off again. He was awakened by one of the Doctor’s guards carrying a tray with a glass of tea and hard cakes. He was hungry and the meager repast was like a feast to him. They must have gained the Doctor’s trust because they were not blindfolded this time. It was still dark when he went outside and got into the Impala with Marzak and the Doctor.

The car took them back to the field that had been used for the helicopter drop-off the day before. The unmarked helicopter arrived within minutes. When the professor went aboard, he saw four hard-faced men wearing military uniforms that, like the helicopter, had no designations.

The professor squeezed past the SCUBA gear stacked on some of the other seats and found space to sit at the rear of the cabin. Marzak got in the front behind the pilot and co-pilot.

The helicopter lifted off and after a couple of hours in the air, began a vertical descent into a valley between snow-capped mountains, landing on a low hill next to the three Bell Cobra AHI-F guns ships. All markings on the narrow fuselages were painted over.

Several dozen bearded tribesmen came running over to meet the helicopter. Undeterred by the dust cloud stirred up by the spinning rotors, they surrounded the aircraft and shot bursts from their automatic weapons into the air to greet the landing party. The professor followed Marzak out of the helicopter. A man dressed in a flight uniform came over from one of the Cobras and spoke to Marzak. He couldn’t hear their conversation, but he saw the man nodding his head.

When the conversation ended, Saleem went over to Marzak. “The Doctor’s followers are excited to see us.”

Marzak smiled. “They are impatient to see the show.”

“Show? I don’t understand.”

“The Doctor asked me to have the helicopters make a practice run on that abandoned village,” Marzak said, gesturing in the direction of a cluster of buildings at the foot of the hill. “He wants his men to know what they can expect when it comes to the real thing.”

Within minutes, the Cobra’s rotors thrummed the air. The gunships lifted off and gained elevation, then flew along the length of the valley in a single line until they diminished to the size of gnats. At the vanishing point they did a U-turn and sped back at a hundred-and-fifty miles an hour.

As they approached the village, the gunships angled down on a long descending trajectory, leveling off in a low wedge formation with the lead pilot’s aircraft at point. The sound of buzz-saws cut through the chop of rotors as the Cobras fired the three-barreled Gatling cannons housed under their noses.

The guns were made to penetrate tank armor and the 20 mm slugs easily ripped through the mud-walls at the rate of more than seven hundred rounds per minute. Buildings crumbled to dust under the fierce fusillade.

As a follow-up, the Cobras unleashed seventy millimeter rockets from pods slung under their stubby wings. The rockets streaked into their targets and exploded in yellow and white blasts that produced billowing clouds of black smoke. The helicopters ended their run and banked around in a big curve.

The professor was wearing aviator sunglasses, but he averted his gaze from the blinding explosions for a second. When he looked back he could not believe his eyes. Figures were emerging from the columns of smoke. There had been people inside the buildings! Those that had survived the guns and rockets had been turned into human torches. They only made it a few steps before they fell to the ground where they burned like logs in a fire place.

All around him the bearded men shot their guns in the air and cheered. The Professor pushed his way through the throng to Marzak.

“You said the village was abandoned!” Saleem said.

Marzak shrugged.

“I was telling the truth, Professor. The village was abandoned by its original inhabitants. It has since been used as a prison to hold traitors while it was decided what to do with them. When I spoke to the Doctor this morning we decided what to do with them,” Marzak said. “Why? Is there a problem?”

So that was what Marzak’s conversation with the helicopter pilot was all about. The professor was enraged at having been made a party to murder, but he was aware of the tribesmen, who had gone menacingly silent, and were crowding in close around them.

He forced his lips into a smile.

“No,” he said. “No problem.”

He turned away and strode back to the transport helicopter. The deadly demonstration had only reaffirmed what he already knew, that his cousin had underestimated the ruthlessness of these men. They would stop at nothing.

Tomorrow the three Cobra helicopters would swoop in and unleash their power on the warlord’s compound. The transport helicopter carrying Marzak and his newfound friend would land the dive team and their guards at the treasure site. They would be joined by the other helicopters after they had reduced Amir’s compound to smoking rubble.

Professor Saleem was neither a coward nor a hero. Like most men, if sufficiently pressed, he had the potential to earn either title, but extremes of behavior were not part of his character. He preferred to occupy a safe middle ground that placed no demands on his ego or his well-being. Now, to his dismay, for the first time in his life he was having moral qualms that could not be rationalized away with clever intellectual argument.

He knew that Amir Kahn’s village would have women and children. The thought of these innocents facing the same awful force as the inhabitants of the so-called abandoned village had knocked him from his precarious perch of neutrality, leaving him in a position where he was seriously entertaining the thought of doing something that would place him in danger.

There was only one problem. He hadn’t quite decided what to do.

Or even if there were anything he could do.

The man leaning against the wooden building next to the site of the OK Corral gunfight could have been one of Tombstone’s desperado re-enactors, except for a major difference. Tyler Lee Clayton was a real killer.

Clayton was from Alabama where he’d knifed a man in a gambling brawl. The trial judge was a friend of the Clayton family, and said he would suspend the jail sentence if Tyler joined the army. Clayton signed up. At the time, the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel for people to send to Iraq and Clayton’s anti-social behavior was seen as a boon rather than a barrier.

A thin cigar drooped from his lips as he surveyed the streets of Tombstone. He was around five feet nine, rangy in build, with stringy muscles packed on his slender frame. He had a lean face with high tight cheekbones and flat gray eyes that suggested the coiled violence of a rattlesnake.

He wore a black T-shirt and his bare arms were covered with death-themed tattoos. Without the pull-down cap, gloves and belt-knife, he bore little resemblance to the Ninja-leader who had destroyed the house in the Tubac hills a few hours earlier.

The expression of simmering anger contorting his hard features was stoked by the burning pain in his rib-cage. The handle-bar of the motorcycle had slammed into his mid-section like a steer’s horn and inflicted a long, dark bruise on his pale skin. Back in the day, he never would have allowed himself to be ambushed so easily. He had been under the impression that he and his men were disposing of a defenseless young woman, not the crazed road warrior who had roared out of the outbuilding and tried to run him over. He had taken a lot of crap from his comrades before he’d silenced them with a dangerous stare.

A man was strolling toward him along the boardwalk. He was dressed in black pants and T-shirt, too. Although he was shorter and broader-shouldered than Clayton, and his complexion was olive rather than fish-belly white, he had a similar dead-eye expression on his face. His name was Vinnie Tartaglia, and he had gotten into trouble of his own in Staten Island before becoming another bottom-of-the barrel army recruit. He was not as smart as Clayton, but he was equally as violent. Vinnie said. “Talked to a guy in that restaurant. A woman came in on a Harley a few hours ago and had breakfast. She was pretty quiet, he said.”

“She’s going to be quiet for a long time after I catch up with her.”

Vinnie snickered. “You hear from Tech?”

“Yeah. They say she left town headed southwest from here. They tracked her phone before it went dead a few miles from Fort Huachuca.”

“She could have gone toward Bisbee, maybe, or doubled back to Nogales and crossed the border. Maybe even slipped by us on the way to Tucson. She’s probably hundreds of miles from here by now.”

“Maybe not. I talked to our psych department. They’ve got the whole file on her. Crazier than a bedbug, but watch out when she’s cornered!” He patted his sore ribs for emphasis. “Some people will run for as long as they can when they get scared, but she’s a hunker-downer, they said. Looks for someplace she’s been before where she can hide instead of run.”

“This is big country. Lots of hiding spaces.”

“Tech’s running a check of her finances. Credit cards. Stuff like that. They’ll know where she’s been before. Maybe a motel or hotel. Or even a campground.”

“What do you want me and the rest of the guys to do?”

“Hang out for now. Grab some lunch while we call in back up to establish a perimeter.”

“Sounds good,” Vinnie said. He noticed the sign on the wall. “Hey, they’re doing a reenactment of the OK shoot-out in twenty minutes. Want to go see the good guys kill the bad guys?”

Clayton glanced at the sign.

“Naw,” he said, flashing a gap-toothed grin. “Too violent.”

After about an hour on the highway, Sutherland had pulled over and ditched her phone. She wasn’t taking any chances that someone would triangulate her position using her cell phone signal, and she still had her back up phone registered under a different name and number. Then she had headed south, where she had a place in mind that might be a good hiding spot.

Sometime later, she arrived on the outskirts of Fort Huachuca, where the U.S. cavalry had set up shop in 1877 to intercept Geronimo’s escape routes into Mexico. She turned off the highway south of Sierra Vista, away from the strip development along Route 92, and followed a winding narrow road into the quiet precincts of Ramsey Canyon.

At the end of the road, she parked near a low-slung building. The sign out front identified it as an inn. She had stayed at the B and B on one of her painting trips. It was a few hundred yards from a nature preserve where she had found many avian subjects for her canvas.

The middle-aged innkeeper was on her way into town, but she said no one was staying at the inn and there was plenty of room available. The hummingbirds that attracted the usual bird-watchers hadn’t arrived in the canyon yet. She told Sutherland to make herself at home and to enjoy a slice of fresh-baked apple pie.

Sutherland took her up on the offer then went for a quick hike in the preserve. She was famished when she returned and polished off, not without some guilt, around half of the newly-baked pie. Then she settled into a Western print sofa opposite the stone fire place, opened her laptop and wrote a message to Hawkins, asking him again to contact her. She waited a few minutes, but there was no answer. After chewing over a few more what ifs, she consoled herself with the fact that he and Calvin were very good at what they did.

Besides, she had to watch out for her own butt.

It was clear what had happened. Lulled by the peaceful setting of her desert home, she had forgotten that the cyber network she used to detect threats was a two-way street to her front door. She had blundered in trying to get at the Arrowhead Foundation’s tax status. She had set off alarms when she made the amateurish call to the Foundation, then compounded her error when she got too nosy about Trask.

She had placed filters on her phone number and email address, but anyone with a brain could have followed the trail back to her. Especially an outfit like Arrowhead which specialized in security.

Still, the speed and fury of the response surprised her.

The men who burned down her house had come to kill her; she was convinced of that. The intruder who had removed his mask before destroying her paintings was the same man who had led his fellow soldiers to attack her back in Iraq. A jerk named Clayton. She thought she had dealt with him when she salted his record with child pornography and couldn’t believe he had come into her life again.

She started to shiver.

Get a grip, she told herself. They know who you are, but you know who they are, too.

Rather than look for new data, with its inherent risks, she called up the Trask file.

Trask had been born in a small town in Oklahoma. He had graduated from a run-of-the-mill university with average grades. His private practice floundered within months. No surprise. You’d have to be crazy to go to a faker like Trask. He had gone to work for the military training soldiers how to survive as prisoners. He might have disappeared into obscurity if not for 9/11 and The New York Times, which had published a report on the CIA use of water-boarding and sexual humiliation in interrogating terror suspects.

Trask’s work became public because of a complaint filed against him with the Oklahoma State Board of Psychologists. The complaint came from another Oklahoma shrink, working with a lawyer and law professor. It documented in detail Trask’s role in the harsh interrogation techniques, asking that his license to practice be pulled. It said he had misrepresented his qualifications and that his torture techniques, in addition to being immoral and illegal, lacked a scientific basis.

He was described as working as a private consultant, never replied in public to the charges, and a funny thing happened to the complaint. The state board tabled the accusation after the three filers failed to pursue the case. She looked into the background of the complainers. The professor had retired, the lawyer moved to another state and the psychologist who instigated the complaint was dead.

Cold fingers clutched at her heart. The psychologist had died in an accidental house fire.

She forced herself to keep reading.

According to the Arrowhead website, he was involved with the children’s project after his work with the CIA. But in the years in between, when he supposedly worked as a consultant, he did the psychiatric evaluations of Sutherland and Hawkins that led to their discharges.

Arrowhead was a private foundation, but Sutherland was aware from her Iraqi experience that contractors occupied a twilight zone, neither civilian nor military, but something in between.

She went back to the website where she had discovered the link between Trask and Murphy. She called up the photo of Trask and the teddy bear, with Murphy guarding him from the little girl. There was another man standing in the field behind Murphy, also wearing a flak jacket.

She enhanced the photo using computer software. His mustachioed face came into focus. It looked vaguely familiar.

Hell, it couldn’t be.

She opened the folder for the Newport Group. She had given each member of the group his or her own file and established preliminary bios with photos.

She clicked on the bio for Captain Michael McCormick. Hawkins had said the guy had acted like a jerk. The photo showed him wearing a navy officer uniform and his lip was clean-shaven. Instead of dark sunglasses he wore heavy-rimmed spectacles. His mouth was spread wide in the same wolfish grin he wore on the Arrowhead site.

Sutherland placed the two pictures side by side, and then looked at them upside down. They showed the same man; she was sure of it now.

Captain McCormick had worked for Arrowhead.

Trask had worked for Arrowhead.

Murphy had worked for Arrowhead.

McCormick worked for Arrowhead and the Newport group.

She started to sift in earnest through the lives of everyone in the group, following links to look for other connections to Arrowhead or to each other. It would take hours of tedious work, and she was aware her queries could be traced back to their source, but tip-toeing in and out was the kind of thing she was good at. She looked forward to the challenge. She would need to prepare herself for the task ahead, though.

She set the laptop aside, got off the sofa, went into the kitchen and cut herself another piece of apple pie.

The odd-looking convoy wound its way through a series of linked valleys, snaking between scraggly hills, eventually breaking out into countryside that was open and relatively flat. The antique Cadillac was in the lead, its convertible top down. Amir was behind the steering wheel. He had insisted that Hawkins ride beside him. Cait sat in the back seat. Next in line was the DPV, and then came the troop carrier and the Russian jeep.

Amir had quizzed Hawkins about his stiffness of leg.

“Got too close to an IED,” Hawkins said. “Crude but effective. The crew at Walter Reed patched my leg back together, more or less.”

“We may have had the same doctors at Reed. They reassembled my body parts after I failed to outrun a Russian rocket.”

“You must have been in the hospital a long time to pick up that American accent,” Hawkins observed.

“Several months, but I also spent a year studying at Georgetown University while I recuperated.”

“Is Georgetown your connection with Dr. Everson?”

“Indirectly, yes,” said Cait, who had been listening to the conversation.

Amir glanced in the rear-view mirror. “I’ve been looking at the vehicle your friend is driving. It looks very utilitarian.”

“It is. Fast, too.”

“This car too is fast. I’ve replaced the original V-8 engine with a much more powerful one. The suspension and wheels have been strengthened and the tires customized to allow for higher speeds, especially on rough terrain.”

“I’ll bet you it still isn’t as fast as the DPV, even with the load the buggy is carrying,” Hawkins said. He regretted the comment the second it left his lips. Amir didn’t seem to be the type who would turn down a challenge, even one that was only a figure of speech. He was right.

“The wager is accepted,” the warlord said.

Hawkins stalled. “We haven’t agreed to the stakes.”

“We’ll talk about that later,” Amir said. “Please hold tight, Dr. Cait.”

Then he nailed the gas pedal.

The two-ton touring car didn’t exactly accelerate with a whoosh, like a later model high-performance car would have done. The heavy body seemed to be waiting for the engine to persuade it to pick up speed, which it did gradually, as befitting its dignity, and quickly gained velocity. They were emerging from the valleys and the terrain was changing into an arid, grass-covered plain that allowed for faster driving.

Hawkins checked the car’s speedometer. The needle was at seventy miles per hour. The Caddy was leaving a thick brown rooster tail a hundred yards behind it.

“Cal’s not going to like breathing dust,” Hawkins yelled at the sheik.

In reply, Amir grinned and pushed the car’s speed up to eighty, but the smug smile left his face after a quick glance in the mirror revealed a pair of halogen headlights close on his tail. He gave the touring car another ten miles of speed. The headlights disappeared, only to reappear a second later off to the left as the desert vehicle emerged from the cloud.

Calvin was hunkered down low behind the wheel. Abby held onto her cap with one hand and the underside of her seat with the other.

Amir depressed the gas pedal to the floorboards, but Calvin paced them for a moment. Then he gave a wave, and passed as if they were in reverse, enveloping the Caddy in a cloud of dust.

Amir shouted something that Hawkins didn’t understand. He pointed ahead and stabbed the air with his forefinger.

“The lake! The lake!”

Cait bent forward and yelled in Hawkins’ ear. “Make them stop, Matt, for Godsakes! The lake is just ahead.”

Hawkins knew that Cal would try to put as much distance as he could between him and the touring car just to rub it in. He had no walky-talky or telephone to warn of the impending disaster. He reached over and brought his palm down on the horn pad at the center of the steering wheel.

There was a loud, clarion beep.

He slammed the horn again, producing a quick beep, followed by two more, then three long, then three short. He repeated the SOS call again. Amir was slowing, but the dust was still thick and Hawkins had no idea whether he had been successful or not. Amir carefully braked to a complete stop.

Cait had a shell-shocked expression on her dust-smudged face. Hawkins rose from his seat and looked over the top of the double-glass windshield.

A slight breeze blew the curtain of dust aside to a point where it was opaque rather than solid. Hawkins could see the outline of a solid shape a few dozen feet ahead.

He got out of the touring car and strode to the driver’s side of the dune buggy.

Calvin sat back with his feet up on the dashboard. He and Abby were covered with dust, but they were laughing hilariously.

“About time you showed up,” Calvin said. “What’s with the Mayday?”

“Did you need a rescue?” Abby chimed in.

Hawkins spit out a mouthful of dust.

“Nope. You did. You were about to pull a Thelma and Louise.” He pointed ahead. The dust was settling and they could see the edge of the cliff around thirty feet from the front bumper of the desert vehicle, and the blue waters of the lake beyond.

Calvin leaned on the steering wheel.

“Man-oh-man. The DPV would have sunk right to the bottom.”

“Along with Fido and months of research.”

“Uh-oh,” Calvin interrupted, glancing in the rear-view mirror. “Hope your pal isn’t a sore loser.”

Amir was walking toward the vehicle with an escort of armed guards. Cait had gotten out of the car and tailed behind. Amir had a deep frown on his face as he circled the desert vehicle, tapping the tires with his cane, but when he came back to the driver’s side he flashed a smile.

“How much do you want for this wonderful chariot?” he said.

“Sorry, but she’s not for sale.” Calvin figured his answer was too abrupt, so he said, “But I can let you drive her.”

“It’s a deal. I will hold you to your offer when we have more time. Now let me show you the lake.”

He hobbled to the ragged edge of the cliff and swept his cane in the air like a tour director for Cook’s. The top of the bluff sloped down at a forty-five degree angle to meet the calm water twenty feet below. The lake was around two miles long and a mile wide, narrowing somewhat near the middle to give it the distinctive figure eight-shape Hawkins had seen in the satellite photos. A line of white cliffs was visible on the opposite shore.

Hawkins shielded his eyes against the sun glare. “The Valley of the Dead,” he murmured.

“Yes, that’s right,” Amir said. “It is still called that even though the valley was flooded decades ago by artesian wells. How did you know its name?”

“I read Dr. Everson’s research paper.” Hawkins pivoted on his heel and gazed at the rocky hill shaped like a camel hump. “That’s the land mark you mentioned, Dr. Everson. Which means the treasure cave should be under our feet.”

Cait clapped her hands lightly.

“Bravo, Mr. Hawkins. If you were my student I would give you an A. But actually, the cave is about two dozen paces in that direction.”

Cait led the way to the metal cover, which Amir’s men moved aside. Hawkins knelt at the edge of the opening and winced at the foul exhalation. He could see timbers set around the walls near the top.

“Kurtz’s mine shaft?” he asked Cait, who knelt beside him.

“I believe so. I explored it a few days ago. It’s flooded at the bottom where the restraining timbers caved in. I found evidence that a diver might have died in the cave-in.”

Hawkins brushed some rocks from the edge of the shaft and counted the seconds until he heard the echoing splash. “Deep,” he said. “Why would Kurtz go through the trouble of digging this hole when his diver could have gone into the lake and found the cave entrance?”

“I’m hoping you and your friends will soon answer that question,” Cait said.

“Unfortunately, I can’t allow them to proceed with the treasure hunt, Dr. Cait,” Amir said.

“What are you saying, Amir? We’re on the verge of one of the most important historical finds of the century.”

“The historical significance hasn’t escaped me. But we’re talking about the possibility of a fortune falling into the wrong hands.”

“But that’s why these people are here. To keep it out of the wrong hands. Do you want the Taliban or some other terrorists to get their hands on it?”

“No, of course not. No offense, Mr. Hawkins, but I consider the Americans as just another occupation force in a long line of foreigners who have taken over our country for their own purposes. When I fought the Russians, it was to have an Afghanistan for our people alone. Why should I allow you to take the treasure or allow it to go to the corrupt people in Kabul?”

“I can’t argue with you there,” Hawkins said. “But if you feel that way, why did you show us the lake?”

“We share a common goal to keep the treasure out of the wrong hands. The unanswered question has to do with the ultimate ownership of the treasure.”

“Where would you like it to go?”

“To a place where it would benefit the people of my country.”

Hawkins thought about it, then said, “Maybe I can offer an enticement to change your mind.”

The sheik pinioned Hawkins with his eagle gaze. “Go ahead,” he said.

“The treasure’s last owner of record was Prester John. Its intended destination was the Vatican. It’s in Afghan territory. So the ownership seems to be in some dispute, although I’d lean toward finders-keepers. My mission is to find the treasure so it can’t be used by terrorists. The treasure’s ultimate fate is immaterial to me.”

“Then you’d turn it over to me? No conditions?”

“If it’s found on your territory. Yes. No conditions.”

“I’m glad to hear that is your position, because if not, I would have to take it away from you at gunpoint. You have my permission to go ahead.”

“Thank you, Amir,” Cait said. It would embarrass the sheik if she showed her thanks with any type of physical display so she instead threw her arms around Hawkins. Hawkins had no such reservations, and reciprocated her embrace. Then he caught Abby’s glare.

The stony expression on Abby’s face suggested that he had missed some signals, and despite her detached manner she retained more than a little affection for him. Or, if he were cynical, it was only her natural competitiveness. He was relieved a moment later when Cait went over and hugged Calvin, then Abby.

Hawkins glanced at the position of the sun in the western sky and turned to Amir. “We could move faster if we had a hand unloading our gear.”

“Done.” Amir relayed a series of commands.

Hawkins went around to the rear of the dune buggy and undid the bungee cords and ropes. He carefully peeled back the dust-covered tarp and he and three other men lifted the submersible and placed it near the edge of the cliff on a line with the mine shaft.

The claw-like caliper had been packed separately, as had the computer used to communicate with the submersible. While a portable generator charged Fido’s batteries, Hawkins reattached the manipulator and he and his crew lowered the docking station at the end of its cable down the slope of the cliff into the water.

Calvin and his crew cleared the gear off the side carriers. Abby directed the placement, stacking the equipment in order. Food, water and other supplies. Dive gear. Gas generator. Calvin moved the lockers containing his arsenal on his own, placing them in one of the three pop-up tents that had he and Hawkins had erected.

Within an hour, they had established a search and salvage operation at the edge of the lake.

Amir circled the submersible, much as he had the desert vehicle, asking incisive questions about its operation. Hawkins explained how the vehicle would be programmed to conduct a search of the slope in a series of parallel lines. Its television cameras would make a visual record of all prominent features and side-scan sonar would probe under the slope. Once the data were analyzed, the dive could get under way.

Amir watched as the AUV was lowered into the lake. It was attached to its docking station to get its instructions and after a few minutes, backed away on its own and submerged.

“Marvelous! What next?” Amir said.

“We wait for Fido to do its job. It will run into the night. We should have a clear picture of the slope by the morning.”

“I have to get back to my village,” Amir said, “I’ll return at dawn. Dr. Cait?”

“I think I’ll go with you. I need to clean up and change.”

Abby noticed the exhaustion in Cait’s face. She said, “If it’s okay with you, Matt, I’ll go with Cait and lend a hand.”

Amir ordered four of his men to remain with the troop carrier. Then he got into the touring car with his two passengers and drove off into the fading light. Dusk was falling and the surface of the lake had gone from glittering silver to pewter.

Hawkins heard the sound of his name. Calvin was stirring a pot on a camp stove and Hawkins’ nostrils almost quivered like a hound’s as his nose picked up a succulent fragrance.

Calvin’s famous New Orleans gumbo.

Sutherland hit the wall in the wee hours of the morning. Her eyes felt as if they were on fire. The words marching across the computer screen were doing jumping jacks. She stretched out on the sofa and pulled a blanket over her body, intending to take a five minute break. The twittering of birds flocking to the window feeder woke her up. When she opened her eyes it was daytime.

She stretched her jaws in a mighty yawn, rose from the sofa and walked stiffly to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. The inn owner breezed in to prepare breakfast. While she stirred eggs for a vegetarian omelet, the inn-keeper said, “Most of the hummingbirds haven’t arrived yet, but there may be a few in the upper reaches of the canyon, if you feel like a climb.”

“Thanks. I might do that,” Sutherland said, only half listening.

She munched on a slice of buttered multi-grain toast and pondered the results of her computer search. She’d found bits of information that bolstered her original findings linking Arrowhead, Trask, Murphy and the Newport Group, through Captain McCormick. She had found no connections between Arrowhead and the other members of the Newport group.

She finished breakfast and helped clean up in the kitchen. The inn-keeper had an appointment in town and said she’d return in a few hours. Sutherland was alone in the inn again, staring at the beautiful sunny morning on the other side of the window. She tried to contact Hawkins on his satellite phone. No answer. Damn you, Matt! Didn’t he know she was numb with worry?

Maybe a walk would help. She gathered up her Canon digital camera, a compact pair of powerful binoculars, a sketch pad, pencils, bottled water and protein bars, and stuffed everything into a day-pack with her computer. She slung the pack onto her shoulders and stepped outside, eyes blinking in the bright sun.

She checked on her Harley, then went over and climbed the low fence into the nature preserve, unaware that unfriendly eyes followed her every move.

Tyler Lee Clayton was a crude, violent man, but he was not stupid.

When Tech had sent the picture of Sutherland on his smart phone, it had triggered memories of the assault on the young army recruit. He remembered planning the attack as if it were military operation. He had watched her leave the barracks every night at the same time for a cigarette. He had enlisted his drunken buddies to help him, knowing it would be her word against theirs that it was consensual. He knew that she would be reluctant to report the attack because she would have to admit going out without her weapon.

And he remembered the hummingbird tattoo on the pale skin of her right shoulder.

He had flashed back on the tattoo as he burned the hummingbird painting, but gave it no further thought until he had come across the promotional brochure in the lobby of the Sierra Vista motel where he and Vinnie had taken rooms for the night.

He plucked the brochure from the case and stared at the photograph of a ruby-throated hummingbird, under the headline, “Hummingbird capital of the world.” The text said that fourteen different species of the “flying jewels” could be found within the three-hundred acre nature preserve on the eastern flank of the Huachuca Mountains.

He handed the brochure to Vinnie. “I know where our little biker girl is hiding.”

Tartaglia looked at the folder with the map showing that the preserve was around five miles from the motel. He wrinkled his brow.

“What makes you think she’s hiding here?” he said.

Clayton put his arm around his friend’s shoulder and brought his mouth to Vinnie’s ear.

“A little bird told me.”

Sutherland hiked along a shaded-trail and crossed a wooden bridge over Ramsey Creek, eventually breaking out of the woods after about a half a mile. She walked along the grassy floor of the canyon at the base of the mountain, past the ruined wooden buildings that harkened back to Ramsey’s days as a mining camp. The mountain was a vertical stone wall, hundreds of feet high that looked as if it had been sheared by a gigantic meat cleaver. The sky was a crystalline, Delft blue.

With every breath of fresh air she pulled into her lungs she seemed to inhale the limitless energy from her wild natural surroundings. Each exhalation purged her mind and body of the memory of her burning house and blew away the dark mists that had been gathering in her brain.

The trail angled up, gradually at first, eventually going back and forth in a series of narrow, hair-pin switchbacks as the slope steepened. Log stairs helped her navigate the steeper parts. She was overweight, not in the best of physical condition, and made good use of the benches built along the trail.

A third of the way up the mountain she was startled by a loud crashing in the woods. She caught a glimpse of brownish gray and realized she had spooked a mule deer. The animal made several bounds down the mountain then stopped and froze in place. Sutherland took a few steps off the trail, raised the camera to her cheek and squinted through the viewfinder. She shot a picture of the doe and was narrowing the focus to its head when her eye caught movement beyond the animal’s ear, through a break in the trees.

A speck was moving along the floor of the valley.

She got out her field-glasses and focused on a man dressed in black. He stopped to remove his cap and wipe his face with a sleeve, which is when she saw the bright red hair. She examined his face through the lenses. She couldn’t see his teeth but she knew they were gapped. There was no doubt. Clayton.

More men were moving single file behind Clayton.

It began to come together. Arrowhead employed former military people. Clayton could not have found a respectable job, especially after she had altered his records, so he went to work for Arrowhead. And now he was after her again.

Clayton had scattered pairs of men around Cochise County: Tombstone, Bisbee to the south and Benson to the north, all within a quick drive of each other. With his call, they had converged in four cars at the mouth of the canyon at dawn and drove along the winding road, stopping at houses and checking cottage colonies. He recognized the motorcycle in the parking lot outside a B and B.

He and his men pulled over, melted into the woods near the inn and watched the inn-keeper leave. Minutes later, Sutherland set off for the preserve with a hiking pack and disappeared into the canyon. Clayton stepped out of the woods and went over to the Harley. Damned shame to mess up a nice machine, but he couldn’t take any chances. He pulled his flip knife from his pocket and stabbed the tires.

He told Vinnie to stay behind to keep watch on their rear, then he took up the lead and the column of men entered the preserve. Clayton had studied the map and seen that it was a box canyon. He had caught a few glimpses of Sutherland moving on the upper trail, but then she disappeared. He told his men to double their speed.

Perfect.

When they caught up with her, she would be far into the woods where no one could hear her scream.

Sutherland didn’t know how Clayton had found her, but there was no time to ponder. She had to keep moving.

She stepped back onto the trail and began to climb. In her panic, she tripped over an unseen root and went flying forward. She pushed herself off the ground and picked up the glasses that had fallen from her face. Her knees and palms were scraped raw. She ignored the pain and used it to help her concentrate.

Think.

There was no way she could escape. She was already winded. She needed help.

She slipped the back pack off, pulled out her spare phone, went down her list of numbers and pressed the call button. After a couple of rings a man’s voice answered. He recognized her voice.

“Sutherland. What a relief. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Mac. I mean-no. I’m in trouble.”

“We’ve been looking all over for you. Your house burned down.”

“I know my house burned down!” she said. “The guys who burned it down are after me. I need help.”

McHugh’s cool professionalism asserted itself. “Tell me where you are.”

“Ramsey Canyon.”

“Who are these people who are after you?”

“I don’t know,” she lied; she had no time to explain. “I just need help. Please hurry, Mac.” Her voice caught.

“I know where it is. That’s near the major crossing for illegals. There are always patrols in those mountains. I’ll contact one. Keep climbing and see if you can find a place to hide.”

“Thanks, Mac, but it’s too late for that.”

Her pursuers had stopped. One of them was pointing up the mountain. She peered through her glasses and saw Clayton looking directly at her through a pair of binoculars. Then he and the others picked up the pace.

Sutherland started up the trail. She needed time, but she was tired. She climbed with methodical, deliberate steps and forced herself to sit for thirty seconds at each bench before pushing on.

She cursed herself for eating all that pie the day before. She squinted ahead and back, and then decided to strike off through the woods and find a place she could hunker down.

The vines and thorns tore at her bare legs, and her progress was noisy and slow. Even worse, the woods ended and a rock-studded wall a hundred feet high blocked the way. She couldn’t go back, so she began to climb. There were plenty of natural hand and foot-holds and she was surprised at how quickly she was able to get to the top.

She scrambled over the ledge and stood on jelly legs. She was completely exhausted. Heat beamed from her sweaty cheeks. She put one foot in front of the other and walked twenty feet until she had to stop. She was at the flattened top of a pinnacle that dropped down hundreds of feet to the other side. The sheer rock face was smoother than the one she climbed on the way up. She was half-tempted to try to descend when she heard a wheedling voice calling.

“Suh-ther-land,” the voice said. “We know where you are. Don’t be shy lady hummingbird.”

Sutherland gazed down from her dizzying perch, and knew what she would do if she had no other choice. The jack-hammer beat of her heart began to slow as an inner calm took hold of her fevered emotions. She walked back to the ledge and looked down at the black-clad men standing in a curved line at the bottom of the cliff. One of them stepped forward and gave her a friendly wave.

“Hello, Sutherland,” he called. “Remember me?”

“I remember your ugly face, Clayton.”

“Remember the other part of me? That must have made a big impression on you.”

“Sorry, but I didn’t have my microscope with me at the time.”

There was a ripple of laughter from his friends, but Clayton kept his forced grin pasted on his face.

“I see you’ve still got the big mouth that spread lies about me.”

“How did you find me?”

He flapped his arms like wings. “I remembered how much you liked the little birds. You know, like the tattoo on your pretty shoulder and the paintings I burned along with your house.”

“You’ve already had your fun. What do you want from me?”

“We’ve still got a score to settle. I’m taking the balance out of your hide.”

He signaled his men. Then he and his men moved forward to the base of the rock and began to climb. They looked like big black ants climbing up the side of the hill. There was no escape. She turned around and took a deep breath. She would simply make a running start and jump off into space. Clayton and his men would have made the climb for nothing.

She closed her eyes for a second and when she opened them to prepare for her leap she saw a dark spot against the cloudless sky.

She turned and faced forward. Clayton and his men were about half way up the hill.

“Hey, Clayton,” she yelled down. “Did you ever tell your friends why you got kicked out of the army?”

The line of men stopped and turned toward their leader. “Don’t listen to that crazy bitch.”

“Not so crazy that I don’t know you liked pictures of naked little boys.”

She saw him reach for his holster and stepped back from the ledge. A pistol shot rang out, but the bullet harmlessly pinged off the rocks. As the echo faded she heard another, more reassuring, sound from behind her. She turned and saw that the black dot had doubled in size. She stepped forward again.

Clayton had holstered his pistol. He started to reach for it again, but realized that she could easily move out of the line of fire so he started climbing instead, moving past his men. He made it to the top of the ledge just as the Border Patrol helicopter swooped overhead in an ear-shattering clatter of rotors.

The chopper made a tight banking circle and came to a hovering stop over the side of the hill. As the men retreated down the rocks under the rotor downdraft, a stentorian voice issued from the helicopter’s loudspeaker.

“Throw your guns to the ground or you’ll be shot!”

Clayton’s men bolted for the woods, but the helicopter anticipated the move and rotated sideways. Muzzle flashes blossomed brightly in the open side door and the bullets kicked up fountains of dirt. The men who were trying to escape tossed their weapons aside and flopped down on their bellies.

Only Clayton was left standing. He wheeled around and saw Sutherland standing at the edge of the pinnacle, a big smile on her face.

The loudspeaker voice shouted an order:

“Man with the gun. Throw your weapon down or you’ll be shot.”

Clayton ignored the warning. He wanted to wipe the mocking smile off of Sutherland’s face, but he had learned as a soldier to deal with the bigger threat first. The helicopter was only yards away. A big noisy target. He was quick enough to spin around and snap off a round of shots. And he might have done just that if he hadn’t seen Sutherland raise her hand.

She said, “You like birds, Clayton. Here’s a big one for you.”

He couldn’t hear her words over the helicopter noise, but the gesture was unmistakable. He shouted with rage, brought his weapon up and aimed at Sutherland instead of the chopper. Before he could squeeze the trigger he was practically cut in half by hot lead.

His legs buckled, he pitched forward and in the lingering last moments before a black curtain of death fell over his eyes he saw Sutherland, still standing there with her middle finger in the air.

While the hovering Border Patrol helicopter kept watch, the agents on the ground rounded up the attackers and marched them down the trail. The failed look-out, Vinnie Tartaglia, was already in handcuffs. Word of the Ramsey Canyon shoot-out had spread over the police radio network. The parking lot around the visitor center swarmed with sheriff’s men and local police. More vehicles lined the road.

Sutherland hoped to slip away on her bike in the confusion. She would have made her escape if the Harley’s tires hadn’t been punctured. A deputy-sheriff told the police that Sutherland had been up on the mountain, and she was suddenly enveloped by big men in uniforms who wanted to talk to an eyewitness.

Sutherland played dumb and said she had been hiking in the preserve when a bunch of strangers started to chase her. She had called a border agent she knew and he alerted the patrols. But a deputy noticed the Harley’s flat tires and that started a new round of questions.

“It looked to me like these guys were after you, specifically,” the deputy said.

Sutherland stuck with her story, but she knew it was only a matter of time before someone ran a background check and pulled up her psychiatric history. They would run a fingerprint check on the dead man, or one of his thugs would start talking. More questions would follow. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw McHugh arrive. She gave him a big hug and whispered in his ear:

“Don’t mention my house burning down.”

McHugh had a puzzled look in his eyes, but he nodded slightly to say he understood. He told the deputy that since he got the original call, he would interview Sutherland. He took her aside and said, “What’s this all about?”

“I’ll tell you later. Can we get out of here?”

By then, the first agent had lost interest in Sutherland in favor of the desperadoes. McHugh recruited a couple of men to load the motorcycle in the back of the truck and offered Sutherland a ride to Tubac.

Sutherland was steeling herself for the first glimpse of her house, but as the gutted building loomed at the top of the hill, she fought hard to stifle a whimper. The walls were standing, but black halos framed the windows where tongues of flame had blasted out the glass.

They got out of the Border Patrol truck, ducked underneath the cordon of yellow tape that surrounded the house, walked past the burned-out hulk of her RAV4, and eased through the gap that the attackers’ SUV had punched in the electrified fence. They stopped at the front entrance. The stench of burned material issued from the house. McHugh pointed a powerful LED flashlight into the gutted interior of the house. The beam reflected off dozens of jagged surfaces.

He let out a low whistle. “Lots of sharp edges. Air’s full of toxins. I wouldn’t go inside if I were you.”

“I already know what’s inside,” she said in a whisper. “It’s the wreckage of my entire life.”

The border agent shuffled his feet, unsure how to respond. “Let’s go back to the truck.”

Sutherland took a last look at the house. The sight dismayed her, but seeing the ruins up close had a calming effect as well, because it was a done deal and there was nothing she could do to change it. They walked to the truck where McHugh leaned against a fender and lit a cigarette.

“Thought you didn’t like toxins in the air,” Sutherland said.

“It’s a scientific fact that tobacco is a good toxin.” McHugh exhaled twin streams of smoke from his nostrils like a friendly dragon. “You must have had the place insured,” he said, hopefully.

“Yes. I’ve got enough insurance to cover the cost of a new house.”

“Great! You can replace this mess with an even better casa.”

“All my artwork went up in smoke. That’s something insurance can’t replace.”

“Hell, yes. That is tough,” McHugh said. “But it could have been worse. The house and art are gone, but you’re still in one piece.”

“Thanks to you,” she said, “You saved my butt.”

“All I did was make a couple of quick phone calls. The helicopter was only a few minutes away, checking out the border fence, and there are always patrols in the mountains. They’ve learned to shoot first and ask questions later, since an agent got killed by smugglers.”

“I also owe you for helping me slip away from the sheriff.”

He chuckled and said, “That was the hard part, I’ll admit. But the only thing you owe me is an explanation.”

“I guess I do,” Sutherland said. She’d told him what happened on the mountain and nothing more.

“You said on the phone that those guys in the canyon were the same ones who burned down your house.”

“The man they shot was the leader of the arson gang. I saw his face up real close when they did this.”

“Why were these guys after you?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.”

Sutherland laid out the bare facts. She told McHugh how she had seen the attack party on her security cameras and the about the escape through the secret tunnel to the pump house. And how she went to Tombstone then Ramsey Canyon to hide.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“It’s way out their league. This is much too big for the locals.”

He scratched his chin. “Hell, I always thought it was funny, a young woman like you, living up here alone in the hills in a new house with that electric fence. You’re in the witness protection program, and these were the people you’ve been running from.”

“That’s not a bad guess, even if it is wrong. Actually, I’m a computer consultant and I’m involved in a hush-hush project that involves national security. Someone got wind of what I was doing and tried to stop me.”

“If this is a government deal, why can’t you get the feds to protect you?”

“Because it would mean bringing more people into a project only a handful know about. That includes you. That’s as much as I can say.”

McHugh figured that he had hit a wall with his questioning. He pointed to the house.

“What are you going to do next?”

“I really don’t know.”

“I’ve told my wife about you. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you stayed the night. Longer if you want to. We’ve got lots of room since the kids went off to college.”

Sutherland suddenly realized that she hadn’t had a decent sleep for two nights.

“I don’t want to put you out, but I wouldn’t mind a place to catch some Zs.”

“No trouble at all. C’mon then. I’ll call my wife on the way.”

Sutherland glanced at the rear of the truck. “They did a number on my bike. I’ll probably have to go to Tucson to get new tires.”

“Maybe not,” McHugh said. “Get in the truck and we’ll see what we can do.”

They drove to a garage in Nogales on the U.S. side of the border that was owned by a Mexican-American friend of McHugh’s. Using an amazing mental inventory file, he plucked two slightly worn tires from the hundreds stacked on shelves. It took him another ten minutes to replace the damaged ones.

McHugh lived in a modest ranch house in Rio Rico, close to Nogales. His wife was friendly and talkative, and reminded Sutherland of some of her family back in West Virginia. She was a good cook, as well, and Sutherland asked for seconds on the tamales.

Mrs. McHugh must have noticed her guest’s eyes drooping because she led her to her bedroom even though it was fairly early in the evening. Sutherland’s clothes were grungy and she accepted the offer to wash them and pajamas to wear. She took a long, hot shower and slid beneath the cool sheets.

She closed her eyes and considered her situation. She was a target, and the people who were after her had a long reach. Anyone around her was in danger. She would take a short rest and do what she did best.

Disappear.

Hawkins stirred in the cocoon-like warmth of his sleeping bag and glanced at the glowing hands of his wristwatch. He yawned, unzipped the bag, grabbed his computer and stepped out of his tent into the cold night. A welcome scent wafted on the crisp air. The guards were brewing a pot of coffee on a gas stove.

A guard waved Hawkins over and filled a mug for him. The first sip was like hitting the switch on his brain ignition. The potent concoction made the strongest Starbucks brew seem like water.

“Good?” the unlikely barista said.

“More than good,” Hawkins said.

He went over to the lean-to he had erected close to the lake the day before, set his computer on a stack of boxes and booted up. He called up the data Fido had fed into the system after returning to the docking port. An orange-and-black image showed the lake floor moving under the AUV’s camera. Information giving time and depth streamed along the bottom of the screen. A vertical portion of the picture off to the right showed the results of the side-scan sonar.

Calvin had emerged from his tent and followed the scent of coffee to its source. He brought his cup over to the lean-to.

“Man, this tastes like Louisiana crude.”

“Yeah. We can use this stuff in the DPV if we run short on fuel.” Hawkins pointed at the screen. “Have a look.”

Hawkins called up the photographic image of the entire search area. Dotted parallel lines showed the path of the AUV as it moved from the bottom to the top of the slope and back down again.

“Fido was a busy little pup,” Calvin said.

Calvin’s finger traced several dark areas among the layers of rock strata. “These are all potential targets that could be cave openings.”

Hawkins zoomed in on the individual targets, one after another. “There’s one problem. You know what real estate people say. Location times three. None of these openings line up with the camel’s hump or the mine shaft. They’re all off to one side or the other of the mid-line.”

“Maybe someone made a mistake eyeballing the hump.”

“Maybe, but I can’t see Kurtz sinking a mine shaft on the basis of an estimated position. Let’s take a closer look at the slope directly in line with the shaft.”

He went back to the over-view image and called up that section showing the path in line with the shaft. “There,” he said, freezing the image on a huge boulder sitting in a depression. “Notice the shape of the shadow surrounding the rock.”

Calvin squinted at screen. “The hole is rectangular, almost square. Mine opening maybe.”

“That’s my take on it too, Cal. It could be a mine or maybe a cave entrance modified by human beings. Only one way to know for sure.”

“I’ll get the dive gear ready,” Calvin said.

The sun had risen, but the air was still cold and they shivered as they shimmied into their wetsuits. They ran a line down the sloping shore of the lake from the bumper of the personnel carrier. They would hold onto the rope as they made their way down to the water’s edge. A couple of guards carried dive gear and waterproof flashlights to the edge of the lake. With a few strokes of the keyboard, Hawkins programmed the vehicle to return to the boulder it had discovered on its initial search.

Then he and Calvin pulled on their fins and air tanks with the attached Pegasus propulsion units, slipped into the lake and swam over to the floating dock. Fido’s electric motors hummed while the computer went through its positioning procedure. Hawkins and Calvin waved at the guards lined up at the top of the cliff then they dove a few feet and tested their air supply and communications systems.

The AUV slipped below the surface with its headlights on. Propelled by the Pegasus thrusters, Hawkins and Calvin followed Fido, swimming parallel to the underwater slope. The color of the water shifted from silvery blue to navy. Their depth gauges were at one hundred fifty feet when Fido slowed to a stop and hovered with its headlight beams pointed at the massive boulder they had seen on the monitor. The rock was around twelve feet in diameter and wedged tightly into what had been the cave or mine opening.

“This explains why Kurtz sunk the shaft,” Hawkins said. “There was no way he could get by this thing. And from the looks of it, neither can we.”

Calvin poked his sheath knife into the tight seam between the bolder and the edge of the hole. “Where’s that SEAL can-do spirit, Hawk?” He patted a pack harnessed to his chest. “Ol’ Calvin packed some C-4 in his bag of goodies.”

“You want to blast it? You’d need a nuke to pulverize this size rock.”

“Not talking about blasting the rock. I’ll set the charges around the perimeter and see if I can pop that bad boy out like a zit.”

“You have a way with words, Cal. But won’t the explosion bring down the whole slope above the opening?”

“Not if I set the charges right. I’ll blast the ledge at the same time. The pressure will push the plug from behind, the ledge will crumble like an old cookie, and she’ll roll over and out. Hopefully.”

“Hopefully.”

“That’s the best I got, Hawk.”

“Then it’s good enough for me, old pal. Stay here, Fido,” he said to the hovering AUV. “We’ll be right back.”

Hawkins pointed up. They rose up the face of the boulder, and then ascended the slope with strong, steady fin flutters. They were a few fathoms from the surface when they heard what sounded like a jackhammer. Then a buzz-saw went to work.

They hovered, listening as the combined noise grew to a stuttering sound wave that was only partially dampened by the layer of water overhead. A second later there was a flash of light and the water thudded with the vibration of an explosion. There were several more buzz saw episodes, followed by a thrashing, pulsating sound. The surface was stirred up like water in a washing machine and they backed down the slope to get away from the turbulence.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that there had been a fierce attack on land.

From the lack of sound, it appeared, too, that there was a lull. Hawkins signaled Calvin to head up the slope.

They surfaced cautiously through the roiling water. Black smoke drifted over their heads. They shed their tanks, weight belts and fins and crawled up to where they could peer over the edge of the cliff. The encampment was a scene of utter devastation.

Where there had been a dozen or so of Amir’s guards were only broken bodies spread around. The troop carrier was a burning pile of blackened wreckage, and what was left of it was riddled with holes. Through the cloud of greasy smoke, Hawkins could see four helicopters circling the camel hump like hunting raptors. He recognized the slim fuselages of Cobra gunships. The larger helicopter was likely a flying command post.

Hawkins easily reconstructed the murderous assault.

The helicopters would have used the camel hump as cover and swooped in with Gatling guns blazing. The Afghans had fought back with their automatic weapons, but their defense would have been useless in the face of the withering stream of hot lead. After the guns had softened up the defenders, a missile was used to dispatch the troop carrier. The choppers had hovered over the lake for a few seconds before going into a holding pattern around the hump.

Hawkins pushed away a chilling thought. If Abby and Cait had stayed at the camp they would have been among the dead.

“Hey, Hawk. Heads up. Eleven o’clock.”

Hawkins’ eyes followed Calvin’s pointing finger. The larger helicopter had broken from the holding pattern and was heading back toward the lake.

Without another word, Calvin scrambled over the top of the cliff and started running toward the shredded framework of their tents. The attack had concentrated mostly on the troop carrier, but shrapnel had torn through the tent fabric.

“Where the hell are you going?” Hawkins yelled at his friend’s back.

Calvin raised his arm in a follow-me gesture and shouted something about needing help.

The helicopter was coming in fast.

Hawkins swore lustily and clambered over the edge of the cliff. Calvin was at the ruined tents, and he ripped aside the tattered fabric and reached inside. He was struggling to lift a heavy metal locker when Hawkins arrived and grabbed one of the handles. They lugged the locker back toward the cliff, then down the banking to the water.

Hawkins started up toward the cliff again.

“Hey, Hawk, where the hell are you going?”

Calvin’s voice was almost drowned out by the noise of the approaching rotors.

Hawkins gave Calvin the hand signal to stay down and raised his head slightly above the edge.

A charcoal-colored Blackhawk helicopter armed with missile pods on its stubby wings was setting down a few hundred feet from the blazing troop carrier. Seconds after the skids touched ground, the doors flew open and four men carrying AK-47s popped out. They were dressed in camouflage suits with no insignia. Black berets covered their heads. Their facial complexion and body type reflected a variety of nationalities, but they all had the hard-eyed, alert expression of professional soldiers.

Four more men got out. They were carrying duffle bags which they set on the ground. As the armed men stood guard, the quartet opened the bags and began to pull out air tanks and other dive equipment.

Finally, two more men emerged from the chopper. Hawkins couldn’t believe his eyes when a portly man got out of the aircraft and he recognized the professor he had met at Georgetown University. Saleem had shed his tweeds and was dressed in a khaki army uniform, again with no insignia.

Hawkins’ disbelief was further tested when he saw the last man, wearing a similar uniform emerge. The man took a few steps, stopped and swiveled his head robotically to inspect the carnage. In that fleeting second Hawkins saw the face of one of the twin assassins who had shot up his office. The man went over to the divers, who were suiting up, and pointed toward the lake.

Hawkins ducked below the ledge and slid down the slope to where Calvin was waiting.

“We’ve got big trouble,” he said.

Over breakfast at the garden table in the courtyard of his house, Amir had been sharing reminiscences of his late wife with his two guests when he paused and looked first at Abby, then Cait.

“Tell me,” he said. “If the Prester John treasure were in your hands, what would you do with it?”

“I would put it in an exhibition that traveled the world so that people everywhere could see the wonders of the past,” Cait said.

“Spoken like a true seeker of knowledge. Would those people be primarily in the more affluent countries?”

“A fair question. I would make sure the exhibition goes everywhere and that poor people could see it for free.”

“Better. But even if the treasure went on display, how would showing a priceless treasure better the lives of people in a poor country like Afghanistan?”

“By giving them pride in their culture. The glories of their past would show them that they once had a level of civilization that equaled or even surpassed that of Western Europe.”

Amir nodded and turned to Abby. “Do you agree?”

“Cultural pride is a good thing,” Abby said, “but you can’t eat it. I’d slap a big price on the admission tickets and use the treasure as the basis for books, films, videos, reproductions. The money earned would go into a foundation that would distribute the income to countries where it would do the most good.”

“Brilliant!” Amir said. “Could you be persuaded to run this foundation?”

“With your business background, you’d be a perfect choice,” Cait said.

“Thanks for the flattering offer, but I’m pretty busy with my company.”

“Not too busy to travel halfway across the world to go on a dangerous treasure hunt,” Cait said.

“Matt wouldn’t let me say no.” She shrugged. “I guess I’m a sucker when it comes to my ex-husband.”

Cait’s jaw dropped. “You were married to Matt?”

“For a few years, after a whirlwind navy romance.”

“You have good taste in men. He’s extremely attractive.”

“If you’re hinting that I was a fool to give him up, you’re probably right. But Matt would probably agree with me that it was the right thing to do at the time.”

“At the time,” Cait echoed, cocking her head.

Abby knew Cait was about to use her answer as a jumping off place to ask whether things had changed. She liked Cait, but her past was her own business, and she would not be shy about saying so. Amir may have seen the pugnacious look in her eye because he diverted the conversation back to the subject of the treasure.

“Maybe Abby would be interested in your thoughts on the exact nature of the treasure, Dr. Cait.”

Abby gave Amir a smile of thanks for allowing her a graceful exit.

“Be glad to,” Cait said. “Prester John described himself as being fabulously rich and said that he ruled his kingdom with an emerald-encrusted golden scepter. My research suggests that he sent some of his treasure as a gift to the Pope and the scepter as a gesture of solidarity.”

“I could use a scepter like that to rule my own little kingdom,” Amir said with a wry smile.

“You may have the artifact in your hands soon, if Matt’s dive is successful.”

“Then we should soon be on our way,” Amir said. He rose from his chair and said, “My car will be here in fifteen minutes.”

As Abby headed for her room, Cait reached out and touched her arm.

“Thanks for persuading me to spend the night here, and for the first aid on my face,” she said. “I owe you an apology, too. I was pushing too close to your personal business.”

Abby saw from Cait’s expression that she was truly sorry.

“The stuff with Matt? Don’t worry,” she said before setting off down the hallway. “That’s water under the bridge. We’re just good friends, although we may not even be that by the time this adventure is over. Your face looks great by the way. Make-up is a wonderful thing. See you in ten.”

Amir was at the wheel of the touring car. An armed guard sat beside him and two more tribesmen were tucked into the jump seats behind the seated women. More guards rode in the Russian Jeep, behind the Caddy, and others in the DPV, which brought up the rear.

As usual, Amir drove at breakneck speed. They were flying through the agricultural fields when suddenly a pick-up truck appeared coming in the opposite direction. The driver was blinking the headlights and leaning on the horn.

Truck and car simultaneously came to a screeching stop. Amir shouted in anger in Pashto. The driver babbled back at him.

Amir listened for a moment, a grim expression on his face, then he turned to Cait and Abby. “This man says smoke and noise are coming from the camp where your friends are.”

He put the touring car in gear and they covered the distance to the lake in ten minutes. He stopped at the edge of the bluff and with Abby and Cait following, he hobbled to the cliff to peer through binoculars at a black cloud rising from the opposite shore.

“What’s going on?” Abby said.

The Amir handed the binoculars to Abby and pointed across the lake.

“My eyes aren’t what they used to be. Tell me if you see anything.”

Abby studied the camp site for a moment, and said, “Too much smoke.” She handed the glasses to Cait, who had no better luck.

Amir rattled off a series of orders to his men. The Russian Jeep continued on the road around the lake and the desert vehicle headed back to the compound.

“I’ve sent some of my men to scout out the camp and others to warn the village. Somehow, someone got past our outposts. It looks as if I will have to make an apology to Mr. Hawkins for doubting his warnings….”

Amir left off the last part of his comment, but his unspoken words hung in the air.

…If he is still alive.

As he stepped out of the helicopter and looked around at the scene of death and destruction, the professor felt as if he were spinning down into a black vortex of violence from which there was no escape. He’d failed to come up with a way to save lives.

Marzak exited behind Saleem and inhaled the oily miasma deep into his lungs as if testing the nose of a fine wine. The crackle of flames was music to his ears. His pulse raced with excitement, while his glowering eyes burned with a blue fire.

The mercenaries poured out of the helicopter to mop things up, no more emotional than cattle killers in a slaughterhouse. Marzak noticed the rope leading from the truck’s bumper toward the lake. He strode to the cliff and saw where the line led into the water. He ordered the divers to suit up and get into the lake to find Hawkins.

The professor heard the order and raised his hand. “I was under the impression that we were here to look for a treasure. If we encounter the Americans we will take care of them, but it is not our primary goal.”

“It is my primary goal. The Doctor gave me command of these men.”

“And my cousin gave me control of their paychecks.”

Marzak’s nostrils flared in anger. He drew his pistol from his belt, aimed at a wounded man who was attempting to crawl away and dispatched him with a clean shot to the head.

The cold-blooded murder seemed to calm him down. “My apologies, professor. My brother’s death still preys on my mind.”

The professor was aware, especially after the cold-blooded murder he had just witnessed, that his control over Marzak was an illusion. The best he could do was delay. “I understand your feelings. I only ask that your revenge wait.”

“Yes, of course. But please allow these men to do a quick search before they look for the treasure cave.”

“A reasonable compromise,” the professor agreed, knowing that there was little else he could do.

Marzak nodded and went over to the divers to give them their amended orders.

The four divers had donned black military style wetsuits and air tanks and were checking the loads in their APS underwater assault rifles. Developed by the Russians, the rifle had a folding butt stock and an odd-shaped oversized magazine that could hold up to twenty-six rounds. The weapon fired steel dart cartridges and had an underwater range of more than a hundred feet. Each rifle had a knife-bayonet for close combat.

The divers used the descent line to climb down to the water’s edge, where they plunged in and quickly disappeared below the blue surface of the lake.

Minutes earlier, Hawkins had scrambled down the same slope and grabbed Calvin by the arm.

“We’re going to have company,” he warned. “Four guys packing APSes.”

“Better give me a hand with this, then.” Cal grabbed a strongbox handle.

Hawkins put his doubts aside, took hold of the box, and they pulled it down the slope into the water. Around the fifty feet level Calvin signaled a stop and opened the container. The object inside looked like a turbo-drive hairdryer.

Hawkins recognized the Heckler and Koch P11underwater pistol. The thick handle housed a battery pack that electrically ignited the cartridges tucked into the short, fat barrel unit. The cartridges fired steel darts around four inches long with an effective underwater range of about forty feet. Hawkins had trained on the weapon, but never used one in combat.

Calvin extracted several half-pound blocks of C-4 plastic explosive packed in foil, a time fuse, M-60 fuse lighter and blasting cap from his pack and handed them to Hawkins, who tucked them into his vest pockets.

Hawkins raised his eyes, saw four dark shapes silhouetted against the silvery surface glimmer and jerked his thumb down. They used every muscle in their legs to propel themselves to where Fido hovered next to the big boulder. Hawkins had designed the submersible with an external control panel. He doused the headlights and looked up to see a quartet of falling stars floating down into the dark water. The divers had flicked on their flashlights and were making a cautious descent, four abreast.

“I’ve got a dart for each one of those guys with an extra,” Calvin said.

Hawkins knew from his own experience how hard it was to get a bead on a moving target with the Heckler and Koch. The four APS rifles gave the pursuing divers greater range and more than a hundred chances to make a hit.

“Stay close by and get ready to shoot when I tell you,” he said.

He tilted Fido up at the front so the submersible was directed at the divers who had closed the distance by half. Hawkins waited until they were around twenty feet away, then clicked on the headlights.

The divers were clearly illuminated as they shielded their eyes against the powerful halogens with their free hands.

“Now!” Hawkins said.

Calvin fired his weapon at the closest diver. The dart missed by a foot or more. The divers shot at the AUV’s light array using tracer darts followed by killing projectiles. Three of the darts missed, but one thunked into the plastic housing. Hawkins doused Fido’s headlights. A flight of darts shot past them, missing by inches. While the rifles were recharging, Calvin pumped two shots at the darkness behind the nearest flashlight.

There was no sound to announce a hit, but the light jerked in a dozen different directions. Hawkins turned the lights on again and saw a diver clutching the shaft of the dart sticking from his rib cage. Dark blood flowed from the wound.

His companions saw the same horrible sight and kicked frantically toward the surface.

“Good shooting, Cal.”

“Crap! There are still three of them.”

“What would you do if you were them?” Hawkins asked.

“I’d pop some grenades into the water. Even if they miss, the blast will soften us up for a quick assault. Even better, I’d have a chopper pop a missile down our throats.”

“Now what would you do if you were us?”

“Get the hell out of here!”

“We’ll have to surface when our air runs out. The choppers will be patrolling the lake ready to turn us into hamburger. We need a distraction. Follow me.”

Hawkins swam toward the body of the now dead diver. He grabbed him by a fin and held the corpse steady. With the other hand he pulled the C-4 packets out of his vest and handed them to Calvin who knew exactly what his friend was thinking. While Hawkins used Fido to provide light, Calvin bundled four packets with a couple of turns of time fuse. Then he attached a tubular blasting cap to the free end of the fuse.

“This burns at around forty seconds per foot. We’ve got around fifty feet of water above our heads.”

He did the mental calculations, cut off a length of fuse, then attached an M-60 fuse lighter to the end he’d just cut. When they were ready, Hawkins inflated the dead man’s vest until the body had positive buoyancy. Timing would have to be just right.

He gave Calvin an okay signal and pushed the body off.

“You’ve been hanging out with us too long,” he said to the dead diver. “Time to spread yourself around.”

He waited to make sure the body was rising at the expected rate of speed, and then gave Calvin an okay signal. Calvin removed the safety pin, pulled back the spring-loaded firing pin and released it, lighting the fuse.

“Fire in the hole!”

Hawkins and Calvin turned Fido around. Hawkins increased speed with the external throttle. Using the power from the submersible and their Pegasus units, they began to move with agonizing slowness deeper into the lake.

The divers were furious at losing a man in an ambush.

They had forged a more prudent strategy and were stacking the grenades at the edge of the cliff, when one of them glanced at the water and shouted, “Look!”

A shiny black object bobbed to the surface around thirty feet from shore and rolled over to reveal the dead white face of the missing diver.

The divers forgot their improvised depth bomb attack, clambered down the hill, splashed into the water and began swimming toward the body.

Standing at the edge of the bluff, Marzak focused his binoculars on the dead diver and saw a thin plume of gray smoke rising from the dead man’s chest.

He threw the field glasses aside and sprinted inland away from the water.

The Doctor and Professor Saleem had wondered what the fuss was about and were walking his way when he waved his hands at them.

“Run!” he shouted.

They wheeled about and dug in their heels, not sure why.

The divers were only a few feet from the body when the C-4 exploded in a huge fireball that created a geyser of lake water, neoprene and body parts.

The shock wave from the blast surged up the cliff and rolled inland, where it slammed Marzak in the back and knocked him forward like a ball hitting a bowling pin. His face crashed into the rocky ground, breaking his nose. If the impact had not rendered him unconscious, he would have spit out the word that had been on his lips.

Hawkins.

Amir’s scout team returned within an hour. The men gathered around the sheik, babbling in Pashto and jabbing their fingers toward the far shore of the lake. Amir turned to Abby and Cait.

“My men got to within a quarter a mile of the camp. They were afraid to go any further because a helicopter had landed at the encampment. The troop carrier was heavily damaged and they saw bodies lying on the ground.” Anticipating the unspoken question, he added, “They were too far away to identify the bodies.”

Abby was worried about her friends, but she pushed her personal misgivings aside and her military training took over.

“Did your men report anything else of interest?”

“Yes. They heard an explosion, and a short while after that the helicopter took off and flew over the camel’s back.”

Abby glanced up at the clear blue sky.

“The helicopter may have set down to refuel and rearm,” she said. “We’re totally exposed to an air attack out here. We’d better get out of sight before it returns.”

“What about Matt and Calvin?” Cait said. “We can’t just leave them!”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Amir said.

Abby put her arm around Cait’s shoulders. “Matt and Cal are highly-trained soldiers. They’re fully capable of taking care of themselves. They’ll be fine.”

“But what if they’ve been wounded and are just lying there?” Cait said with pleading eyes.

“If they are dead they are dead,” Amir said bluntly. “We must get back to the village, see to the living and prepare a defense.”

As Amir shouted orders to his men, Cait walked to the edge of the bluff and looked across at the wispy clouds of smoke rising from the far shore of the lake.

She was about to turn away, but her eye caught a strange V-shaped ripple and trail of bubbles around fifty feet from shore. Something was moving in her direction.

Keeping her eyes glued to the object, she called Abby over and pointed.

Abby squinted against the glare. “What the hell is that thing?”

Amir noticed the two women staring into the lake and hobbled over. He saw a light-colored blur moving toward land and called his men over. He pointed his cane at the object which became more yellow in tone as it rose to the surface.

The black muzzles of six automatic weapons tracked the object until it stopped around twenty feet away. It was a tribute to their discipline that they didn’t unleash deadly fire when one head, then another, popped to the surface. A hand reached out of the water and pulled the hood back and goggles down to reveal the grinning face of Hawkins.

“Hello,” he said as if returning from the dead were a normal occurrence.

Calvin pulled his mask down as well. “You-all going to stand there or give us a hand?”

The two men pushed the AUV in until it touched the bottom of the sloped bank. Amir’s men hauled Fido out of the water and onto the top of the cliff. Then they helped Hawkins and Calvin who crawled out of the lake as if they were antediluvian water creatures making the transition to land. They stood on shaky legs at the top of the cliff and slipped out of their dive gear.

“This is a miracle,” Amir said. “Did you swim underwater all the way across the lake?”

Hawkins patted his friend on the back. “It was nothing for a navy SEAL. Right, Calvin?”

“An ex-navy SEAL,” Calvin corrected. “Speak for yourself, man. You said we could ride Fido all the way.”

“What Cal is saying is that Fido gave us a tow until its batteries ran down,” Hawkins said.

“And our propulsion units fizzled.” Calvin puffed his cheeks out. “We had to drag the submersible the last couple of hundred feet. It was like moving a refrigerator underwater.”

“Fido is a prototype,” Hawkins explained. “Still got a few bugs to work out of its battery system.”

“I’ll carry some extra double AAs next time,” Calvin said.

“Maybe you two could stop your bickering long enough to tell us what happened over there,” Abby said.

“Sorry, Abby.” Hawkins took in a lungful of air and let it out. “There was an air attack. Three Cobra gunships with missiles and Gatling guns.”

Amir was familiar with the Cobra’s capability and he knew better than to ask if anyone had survived. “Many of my men have wives and children in the village. The people responsible for this will pay with their lives.” He clutched Hawkins by the arm. “Do you know who is behind the attack?”

“Partially. A Blackhawk helicopter landed after the Cobras did their work and three men who seemed to be in charge got out. I knew two of them. One is the twin of the man who tried to kill me. The other is a professor from Georgetown University.” He looked at Cait. “His name is Saleem.”

Cait gave a coughing laugh. “That’s impossible. The professor isn’t a killer and this is the last place he would be. I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

“I’m afraid not, Cait. I talked to Saleem a few days ago at Georgetown,” Hawkins said.

“How is it that you escaped the attack?” Amir said.

Hawkins explained that they’d been underwater looking at a possible mine entrance and then told of the run-in with the dive team.

“My men said they heard an explosion,” Amir said.

“We used the dead diver’s body and made an improvised floating mine before the divers could make a second try at us.”

“I’ll bet that isn’t in the SEAL bag of tricks,” Abby said.

“Yeah, but it’s in Calvin’s bag,” Hawkins said like a proud father.

“I had the C-4, but Hawk was the one who figured out how to use it,” Calvin said. “Dumb luck.”

“We won’t be as lucky if the choppers come in while we’re out here like sitting ducks,” Hawkins said.

The sheik ordered his men to help lift the AUV onto the desert vehicle. Then they tied their dive gear onto the side carriers. Amir and the women and two guards got in the touring car. The other guards followed in the Russian jeep. Hawkins and Calvin brought up the rear in the desert vehicle.

They dashed through the countryside at a breakneck pace, prompting Calvin to say, “These guys are running as if the hounds of hell are after them.”

Hawkins, who was behind the wheel, glanced in the rear-view mirror and let out an oath.

“What’s wrong?” Calvin said.

“Those hounds of hell you just mentioned?”

“Yeah?”

Hawkins jerked his thumb at the black speck in the sky behind them.

“Hope you brought some dog biscuits.”

He squeezed a few more miles of speed out of the desert vehicle’s engine, knowing even as he did so, that there would be no escape from the helicopter closing in for the kill like a fierce-eyed Valkyrie.

When Marzak regained consciousness, Professor Saleem was bending over him. Sledge hammers pounded against the inside of his skull.

The professor spread Marzak’s eyelids open wide with his fingers. “Do you know your name?”

Marzak slapped the arm away.

“Don’t be a fool!”

“I have some first aid training and was checking for signs of dilation, which would indicate a serious condition. My guess is that it is only a concussion; although your nose may be broken. There’s lots of blood.”

Marzak pushed himself up to a standing position.

“Wonderful.” Marzak said, spreading his mouth in a grin that looked ghastly against the drying blood that streaked his upper lip. “Simply wonderful. You can send me the bill for your insightful diagnosis.”

The mercenaries stood around awaiting orders, but he only gave them a glance and staggered to the edge of the cliff. Three bodies floated in the bloodied waters a few yards from shore. He couldn’t believe it! Hawkins had wiped out his entire dive team.

He scanned the lake surface further from shore. Nothing. Hawkins could have swum further out, but it was doubtful he would have had the strength or the air supply to reach the far side. Marzak guessed that Hawkins was swimming parallel to the shore, looking for a safe spot to come out onto land.

He whirled around and shouted at the mercenaries to spread out along the bluff. Then he strode over to the pile of hand grenades and clipped them onto his belt. He walked along the lake and lobbed the grenades in, one-by-one, creating a line of foamy explosions. He quickly exhausted his supply of grenades, and paced up and down the shoreline, exhorting the mercenaries to keep a sharp eye out, promising a reward to the first man to report seeing a diver, dead or alive.

After a while it became clear that the reward would go unclaimed and he ordered the mercenaries to get back into the helicopter.

The professor confronted Marzak at the door of the aircraft. “What are you going to do about the treasure?”

“You saw for yourself, the dive team is no more. Kaput! We will now proceed to the next stage of our mission, the destruction of the village. Unless you want to walk home, I suggest you get into the helicopter.”

A few moments later, the helicopter was rising into the air. The Cobras were taking on fuel and ammunition on the other side of the camel’s back. Marzak had the pilot radio the gunships to get in the air for an attack.

While he waited to rendezvous with the Cobras, he directed the Blackhawk pilot to fly over the lake on the off-chance that his prey had actually attempted the crossing. There was no sign of anyone in the water, but at five hundred feet altitude, they had a clear view of the entire lake.

The pilot pointed at the dust cloud being kicked up on the far side of the lake and Marzak told him to check it out. As the helicopter sped across the lake, Marzak leaned out the window. In his excitement, he no longer felt the throbbing pain from the ugly bruise in his forehead and the smashed bridge of his nose.

Seconds later they caught up with the three vehicles. He had the helicopter circle around the convoy and saw the open car with two women in it, leading the way. Some of the men in the jeep raised their guns and were trying to get a bead on the helicopter.

As the helicopter banked out of range, the driver of the last vehicle looked up. Marzak recognized the tanned features immediately. Hawkins had somehow made it to safety. He ordered the pilot and mercenaries to prepare for a strafing run.

The helicopter circled around and followed the line of vehicles.

“It’s Hawkins and another man,” Marzak said to the professor. “They’re wearing dive suits. Somehow they swam across the lake.” He laughed. “It’s too bad we have to spoil their day at the beach.”

“Wait,” Saleem said.

“No need. We can take care of Hawkins without the help of the gunships.”

“No!” the professor said. “We need them both alive.”

The smile froze on Marzak’s lips. “Alive? What are you talking about?”

“Our dive team is dead. We need experienced divers to look for the treasure.”

The helicopter had made its turn and was coming in at a low angle, running a parallel course that would allow the mercenaries to unleash a deadly fusillade from the doors and window.

Marzak glared at Saleem. “I know Hawkins. He’s not going to dive for you,” he said with unveiled contempt.

“He might if there was enough at stake. I want them alive for now. Or I’m calling this mission off.”

The professor’s insistent voice and hard-eyed expression told Marzak that there was no room for debate. He watched the vehicles recede to pinpoints in the distance and called on almost superhuman willpower to issue his next order.

“Lower your guns,” he said.

Amir’s village was in complete chaos.

The Cadillac braked to a stop just inside the gate, unable to proceed further in the traffic gridlock. Hawkins got out of the desert vehicle and strode over to the touring car.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“I gave orders for women and children to move to safety,” Amir said. “I assumed that the evacuation would be well under way. This is insanity. I will take care of it.”

Amir rose from his seat and in a booming voice issued a series of angry commands. All commotion ceased and every eye fell on the sheik before the people once again sprang into action. Within minutes, the traffic had parted just enough for the caravan to continue to Amir’s compound. His daughter Nagia stood on the veranda with his granddaughter Yasmeen. Nagia was trying to herd the aged cook and housekeeper into a khaki-colored Land Rover.

Nagia’s expression of angry frustration changed to relief when she saw the procession drive up to the house. Amir and Nagia had an exchange in Pashto, and then he gave her a quick embrace, picked up the little girl and handed her to his daughter, who had gotten into the vehicle. He told one of his men to drive the Land Rover. As the vehicle left the compound he came back to the jeep.

“My daughter will lead the villagers to some caves a few miles from here where they can hide,” Amir explained.

“Good move,” Hawkins said. “The village will be a death trap if the choppers attack.”

“Why didn’t they shoot at us back at the lake?” Calvin said. “They had us dead in their sights.”

Hawkins shook his head. “Haven’t a clue, but it’s only a matter of time before they return.”

“We’re not completely defenseless. I have something to show you that might help,” Amir said.

Hawkins and Calvin were still in their wetsuits, and now they were sweating profusely under the tight neoprene coverings. “But before you do that, you don’t know where we could get some street clothes?”

Amir told them to wait and disappeared into the house.

Abby and Cait got out of the touring car. “What’s going on?” Abby said.

Hawkins repeated what Amir had said.

“What do you want us to do?” Abby said.

“The sheik’s daughter may need a hand getting the villagers to safety. We’ll follow as soon as we see what Amir has up his sleeve.”

“See that you do, Matt,” Cait said. “I’m holding you to that dinner invitation.”

Abby shot an unfriendly glance at Cait and turned to Hawkins with narrowed eyes.

“What dinner invitation is that, Matt?”

Hawkins was struggling to come up with a diplomatic answer when Calvin came to his rescue.

“Dinner we’re all going to have to celebrate getting out of this mess,” he said.

Abby flashed an alligator smile, and then she and Cait climbed into the jeep and headed out of the village to catch up with the evacuation.

“Thanks for the save, pal,” Hawkins said.

“You wouldn’t be much help fighting the bad guys once Abby got through with you, Hawk. She doesn’t like you hound-dogging other pretty ladies.”

Hawkins told his friend to assume a position that would have been anatomically impossible.

Amir came out of the house and handed them two sets of clothing. “This is all I have, unfortunately.”

Hawkins and Calvin stripped down to their bathing suits, then put on the baggy tribal trousers and robe, and the mushroom-shaped hats. They got in the car and the sheik drove to the airstrip. They stopped in front of an old hangar that Amir said the Russians had built. Amir asked for help sliding open the wide wooden door, then led the way into the darkened interior and switched on the overhead lights.

Hawkins let out a low whistle. The walls were covered with weapons that spanned centuries. More weapons were displayed on wooden shelves and in glass cabinets.

“Looks like a military museum,” Hawkins said.

“Actually, it’s a museum dedicated to the folly of empire. These weapons were left behind by armies that invaded my country. We’re in the small arms section.” He reached up and touched the sharp point of a long spear hanging from the wall. “Alexander the Great’s infantry used these Macedonian sarissa pikes with devastating effect. Next to it is a bronze helmet and shield of the same era. This curved sword came in with the Arabs. That saddle was used by a cavalryman in the time of Genghis Kahn.”

Calvin ran his fingers along the wooden stock of a rifle. “Nice Martini-Henry. We saw tribesmen still using these when we were in the SEALs.”

“That weapon goes back to the British invasions,” Amir said. “These are Russian weapons. Kalashnikov automatic rifles, Spetsnaz and Malarov pistols. Grenade launchers. Now the Taliban are using them.”

“I don’t see any U.S. weapons,” Hawkins said.

“All in storage while the war is in progress. No doubt future insurgents will be using leftover firearms from the current war.”

“No doubt,” Hawkins said. “You said this is the small arms section.”

“That’s right. The bigger toys are in the next room.”

Even if Abby had not stomped the Russian jeep’s gas pedal with a lead foot, she and Cait would have had no problem catching up with the fleeing villagers. The more-or-less orderly procession had degenerated into a rout. By the time they caught up it was at a standstill. In their panic, some of the truck drivers had tried to sprint past the slower moving vehicles. The rear guard had gone after them and pulled them over like traffic cops, blocking the narrow road.

Abby drove off the road past vehicles loaded with young and old women, terrified children and wailing babies, eventually pulling up to the head of the line. Some of the armed guards were brandishing weapons at the cowering truck drivers. Amir’s daughter was shouting at the guard leader. She was backed up by several women, all talking at the same time. Some of Amir’s men stood behind the women shouting their side of the debate. Abby leaned on the horn to catch their attention. She took advantage of the pause in the altercation and jumped out of the jeep.

Striding over to Amir’s daughter, she said, “What’s going on?”

When Nagia replied in English the guard excitedly cut her off in Pashto. Abby joined in and within seconds, she too was shouting.

“Maybe I can help,” Cait said. She said something in Pashto and after a moment had managed to silence both speakers who looked expectantly at Abby.

“Thanks,” she said. “Now please tell the guy to move the guards away from the civilians. We will lead the parade. Everyone must stay in line.”

The arrangement seemed to suit the warring parties. The procession slowly got moving again with the Russian jeep at the head of the line.

Abby glanced in the rear view mirror and allowed herself a smile. “Thanks for the help,” she said.

“Anytime,” Cait replied. “About that dinner with Matt.”

“Before you say another word, take a deep breath, look behind us and think about where we are.”

“I see what you mean,” Cait said with a glance at the parade of panicked villagers and their scruffy guards. “We’re a long way from the Ritz.”

Abby smiled. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

Amir pressed an electrical switch and a section of wall slid back on its runners. They stepped into another section of the vast hangar and found themselves looking directly into the barrel of a gun on a massive turreted vehicle painted in camouflage green and tan.

“Whoa!” Calvin said. “Ruskie combat vehicle.”

“Correct,” Amir said, “It was used by Russian Special Forces. It was in bad shape from rocket grenades when I restored it, but the same mechanics who got my car and the troop carrier running rebuilt the engine. I don’t have ammunition for the machine gun, unfortunately.”

They walked around behind the combat vehicle and into another section of the shed occupied almost entirely by a huge biplane.

“This is a British Handley Page bomber dating to World War One. The British used planes like this to bomb villages in the second Anglo-Afghan war. Villagers found it on the other side of the lake many years ago and showed my grandfather who saved it from being cannibalized for parts. It was passed to my father, who left it to me. The body has been meticulously restored, as you can see, and the engines taken apart then reassembled.”

Calvin ran his fingers along the fuselage.

“I’ve heard of these planes, but never saw one before in the flesh. She’s in fantastic shape. Better than anything in my collection.”

“You’re collecting planes now?” Hawkins said.

“Got bored with cars. I’ve got a Sopworth and a SPAD. Still air worthy. Has anyone ever tried to fly this crate?”

“No, but my mechanics are the best and they swear it is fully operable.” He moved toward a large metal storage locker and opened the doors. “This is what I wanted to show you.”

The wall locker held six long metal boxes that were identical in size and color. Stenciled on the outside of the olive-drab containers were the words: Property of the U.S.A. At Amir’s direction, the two men picked up a container and placed it on the floor. Amir removed the lid to reveal a Stinger missile and launcher carefully packed in foam peanuts.

Calvin lifted the missile out of the container.

The Stinger surface-to-air was only sixty inches long and a few inches in diameter, and weighed just over thirty pounds. But as the Soviets had learned to their dismay, the shoulder-fired projectile that the CIA supplied to the mujahideen could knock an aircraft out of the air at a range of nearly three miles and an altitude of more than twelve thousand feet.

“There are more than enough missiles here to shoot down our enemies,” Amir said.

“Not so fast,” Calvin said. “Shelf life of these babies is seven years. The batteries are probably dead and there could be mechanical degradation.”

Calvin spent a few minutes examining each Stinger and its serial number.

Hawkins saw the slow shake of Calvin’s head.

“What’s wrong, Cal?”

“The news ain’t good. These are all from the same lot.”

“Are you saying they’re useless?” Amir said.

“Probably, unless we can throw these puppies at the choppers.”

“I’ve heard about degraded Stingers being rejuvenated,” Hawkins said.

“Me, too. I’d be willing to give it a try.”

They carried the Stingers back to the car and placed them in the rear seat. Calvin found batteries and electrical tools in a workshop. A pickup truck came screaming along the road to the hangar and braked to a stop. One of Amir’s men jumped out and started shouting. Amir turned to Hawkins and Calvin.

“The helicopters have returned,” he said.

Abby felt the air vibrating and a second later, three Cobra gunships flashed overhead. They followed the road for a quarter of a mile or so, then stopped and pivoted, three abreast, their Gatling guns facing toward the village procession.

Abby slammed on the brakes and stood up in the open car.

The three aircraft hovered a hundred feet above the ground like wolves about to close in on a wounded deer.

“What should we do?” Cait said.

“Not much we can do. They’ll make the first move.”

The seconds ticked by like years, then the gunships tilted down so that their guns faced the ground. They advanced at an angle and fired their guns in bursts, moving slowly ahead, the torrent of bullets kicking up fountains of dirt. They stopped firing when the fusillade was less than fifty feet from the jeep.

Abby stared at the narrow aircraft, thinking how ugly they were. “They’re herding us.”

“What?”

“Get out of the jeep,” Abby said. “Start walking back. Tell everyone in line to get out of their cars and trucks.”

“They’ll kill us.”

“Maybe. They could have wiped us out with a rear attack, though. Tell the guards not to fire at the choppers. Please help me, Cait.”

They got out of the jeep and began to walk back along the line. Cait shouted in Pashto for people to abandon their vehicles. As the villagers slowly made their way back to the compound, only then did the Cobras stop firing their guns.

The sheik was visibly shaken by the news that his family was in danger and didn’t protest when Hawkins slid behind the wheel of the touring car and told him to get in the back. Calvin was hanging on the running board when Hawkins took off, but he managed to get into the front seat.

They had traveled less than a mile when they heard the sound of guns and explosions. The villagers were under attack. They’d be caught in the open with no chance to escape. Black smoke billowed into the air. Hawkins had no desire to witness the scene he conjured up in his imagination, but he pushed the accelerator to the floor. Moments later, they rounded the base of a low hill.

The villagers were trekking in their direction, some running, some walking. Three Cobra gunships followed, flying abreast at an altitude of a couple of hundred feet, firing into the ground behind the villagers, herding them as if they were a flock of frightened sheep. The Blackhawk was hovering behind the Cobras. Leading the line were Abby and Cait. Nagia and her daughter, and the elderly servants were walking behind them. In the distance, the cars and trucks were ablaze.

Hawkins drove up to the head of the parade. He told Abby and the other women to get in, then he and Calvin got out to make room. Amir joined them and despite his limp, led his villagers back to the village on foot. The villagers flooded back into the settlement in a reverse version of the bedlam that had ensued during the evacuation. Amir ordered his men to get the women and children under cover. Cait and Abby went back to Amir’s house with the family and staff.

The gunships flew over the village with an ear-shattering clatter, broke formation and landed out of sight. Hawkins and Calvin climbed to the top floor of the house and peered through a window. The Cobras were on opposite sides and to the rear of the village.

The Blackhawk made a slow circle over the village and set down a few hundred yards from the main village gate. Hawkins and Calvin quickly descended to the veranda.

“What did you see?” Amir asked.

“The Cobras have cut off escape on three sides,” Hawkins said. “The Blackhawk is sitting just outside the front gate. Let’s see what they’re up to.”

Hawkins and Calvin drove toward the gate and parked behind an abandoned house. Amir followed with three men. Hawkins put his back flat against the wall of the house and edged around the corner. He watched as the chopper’s rotors spun to a stop, saw the door open and a man get out.

Calvin was waiting for all hell to break out, but the only sound was the oath of surprise that came from Hawkins’ lips.

“What the hell’s going on?” Calvin asked.

Professor Saleem was walking cautiously toward the village with a white flag in his hand.

“I think they want to surrender,” Hawkins said.

Professor Saleem approached the silent village, walking with the stiff-legged gait of a condemned prisoner being led to the gallows. He gulped the crisp Afghan air into his lungs, but he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was about to suffocate. Sweat poured down his face, and he was nearly paralyzed with fear. He was acutely aware of Marzak in the helicopter behind him watching his every move. He didn’t want to think about how many weapons behind the compound’s walls were pointed his way.

His heart hammered away in his chest, and he had a forlorn hope that he might go into cardiac arrest. He was surprised that he hadn’t died of heart failure when the attack on the vehicles was called off at the last second and again when it seemed the fleeing villagers would be massacred.

Marzak hadn’t killed the villagers, seeing them as bargaining chips to persuade Hawkins to dive for the treasure. The professor volunteered to deliver the offer.

Saleem had fashioned a white flag from a strip of bandage from the helicopter’s first aid kit. He whipped the streamer back and forth in his hand as he walked.

He was at the point where he would almost rather die than take another step, when a figure emerged from the village and began walking toward him with a slow ambling pace. The man wore tribal costume, but the professor immediately recognized the craggy features and the bark-like complexion under the mushroom-shaped hat. Matt Hawkins. The man looks like a walking tree, he thought.

They met fifty feet from the village. In contrast to the professor’s pinched features and tense posture, Hawkins had a half smile on his lips and his hands hung loosely at his sides. He projected an unmistakable air of confidence. There was even an unexpected amusement in his dark eyes when they glanced at the make-shift truce flag. “Hello, Professor Saleem. Did you come to offer your surrender or demonstrate your talent as a cheerleader?”

Saleem bunched the bandage up and crammed it into his pants pocket.

“You have a rather mordant sense of humor,” the professor said.

“You’re not the first to tell me that. You’re a long way from Georgetown.”

Saleem managed a quick smile of his own.

“It’s about the same distance to Woods Hole, Mr. Hawkins. Did you come all this way to play Lawrence of Arabia?”

“Touché,” Hawkins said. “What brings you to this lovely garden spot?”

“The same thing that brought you here. Treasure.”

“You’ve given up teaching history, Professor?”

“For the time being. How is my colleague Dr. Everson, by the way?”

“She’s fine, but she didn’t believe me when I told her that you were away from your classroom on a field trip.”

“Teaching was only my day job. Actually, I work for the Pakistani intelligence service.”

Hawkins cocked his head. “Are you telling me that this murderous romp is an ISI operation?”

“No! Far from it. I’ll admit that elements of my service maintain contacts with extremists, but I have been dragged into this mess by the man watching us from that helicopter behind me. You know him I believe. His name is Marzak.”

“He didn’t introduce himself when he and his twin tried to kill me.”

“He is intent on taking revenge against you for killing his brother. But first he must finish a job he was hired to do for a group that came together in the vacuum created when Osama Bin Laden was killed. They call themselves the Shadows and they would like revenge too, but against the entire U.S.A.”

“How’d you get hooked up with these Boy Scouts, Professor?”

“Marzak and his brother were terrorists for hire. The Shadows retained them to carry out a terror plan in the U.S., but it was put on hold while they searched for the treasure. Once they have the treasure, they will move ahead with their plot. I am seen as sympathetic to their cause.”

“You’re telling me that you aren’t?”

“I am nominally in charge of this expedition, but Marzak is in operational control. I am really on your side.”

Hawkins took the professor’s words with a grain of salt. The ISI had a reputation for double dealing, accepting American money and working with the CIA on one hand, enabling the Taliban and terrorists like Bin Laden on the other. Their goals were complicated, and were usually connected to the long-standing Cold War between Pakistan and India.

“Prove it. Tell me about the terror attack they’re planning against the U.S.”

“I’ll tell you what I know. It’s called the Prophet’s Necklace. It’s a scheme to use sarin gas at a number of different locations across the U.S.”

The smile vanished from Hawkins’ face. He knew sarin from the subway attack by a Japanese religious sect that had killed dozens of people back in the 1990s. The deadly toxin could kill within minutes of exposure.

“Do you know the targets of this attack?”

“Several American cities, but I don’t know which ones. I just know that Marzak is the one who can connect the strands with a simple telephone call.”

“He’s got to be stopped, Professor.”

“I’ll do my best, but we have to deal with the present. He sent me out here to offer a proposition.”

Hawkins glanced at the helicopter. “Can’t wait to hear it.”

“It seems that you have wiped out the dive team that was going to find the treasure. Since you and your friend are the only divers in the area, it was thought that your help could be enlisted.”

“Is that why they didn’t kill us when we were driving away from the lake? And why the gunships didn’t attack the villagers?”

“Correct,” the professor said. “I persuaded Marzak to keep you alive so you could find the treasure.”

“You and Marzak are crazier than I thought,” Hawkins said.

“Not crazy at all, I’m afraid. You’re very impressive, Mr. Hawkins, but you are out of your league. The real treasure at the center of this madness represents more wealth and power than anything Prester John could ever have imagined.”

“You’ve got my attention, prof. Now maybe you can tell me what you’re talking about.”

“I will tell you as events unfold. We have more pressing issues now. The man watching us doesn’t have a great deal of patience.”

“Why would we help your friend?”

“Because if you don’t, the Cobras will reduce the village to rubble and kill everyone in it. I saw them do just that in a practice run. A ground force is on its way to move in after the air assault. From what you have seen, you must know that Marzak is capable and more than willing to carry out his threat.”

“What’s the quid pro quo if we agree to dive?”

“They will leave with the treasure and let everyone go free.”

“I admire your ability to say that with a straight face, Professor.”

“It’s an acquired skill,” Saleem said. “We both know that they will kill you as soon as they have the treasure in hand and then proceed to wipe out every man, woman and child in the village.”

“I was thinking along the same lines,” Hawkins said. “Any ideas?”

“My strategy has been to stall as much as I can and hope for the best.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

“Not very well, I must admit.”

“I thought so,” Hawkins said.

He excused himself and spoke into his walky-talky. “How’s the poker game going?”

“Great! I can open with a pair of aces,” Calvin replied.

“Deal me in for the next hand,” Hawkins said. He re-clipped the radio to his belt and said, “It’s been nice talking to you, Professor.”

He turned around and started to walk back to the village.

“You’re going back to play poker?” Saleem said.

Hawkins stopped. “Hell, yes. I had a winning hand when you showed up.”

A panicked look came to Saleem’s face. “Wait! What should I tell them?”

“Tell them we agree. Reluctantly. To save the village. Say that we have to refill our air tanks and pull our dive gear together. It will take about an hour.”

Hawkins entered a building at the edge of the village and climbed a ladder to the top story. A trio of sharp-shooters under the direction of Amir had been watching through holes in the walls, ready to act if needed. Calvin was sitting on the roof with a pile of electrical parts in front of him. He was stripping the end of a wire.

“Who was that pig?” Amir asked.

“His name is Saleem. He’s with the ISI and I think he’s on our side, but it’s immaterial at this point.”

Hawkins gave an edited version of his conversation with Saleem.

“Are you really going to find the treasure for those murderers?”

“I lied,” Hawkins said. “I’m stalling for time.” He turned to Calvin. “About those aces.”

Calvin picked up a Stinger. “I’ve jury-rigged batteries to two missiles. The other systems are too far gone to fix.”

“Will they work?”

“Worth a try. These guys say they know how to use them.”

“Two ‘maybe’ missiles against four heavily-armed choppers. Not great odds.”

“No, but I’ve been thinking about something, Hawk. It’s going to sound crazy.”

Calvin outlined his proposal.

“You’re right. It’s brilliant, but crazy.”

“It’s absolutely insane,” Amir said. “There is so much that could go wrong.”

“I agree,” Hawkins said. “But at the least it will create a diversion to get the women and children out of the village. Is there any place close they can hide?”

“The agricultural sheds are not far away and they’re camouflaged from the air. They might reveal themselves under close inspection, but they could work for the time being.”

“Back to you, Cal.”

“I say we go for it. Nobody would ever expect us to do something so nutty.”

Hawkins looked at his wristwatch. “We’ve got fifty minutes to find out if you’re right.”

Marzak paced back and forth near the grounded helicopter, stopping before each reverse turn to study the low-lying dun buildings. The suspicions ignited when Saleem said the offer had been accepted mounted as the minutes ticked by with no sign of Hawkins.

His wristwatch alarm chimed. Three quarters of an hour had passed since Saleem’s return from his truce parley. Fifteen minutes to go. Then he’d unleash a storm of death on the village and every one in it, including Hawkins.

More pacing. The watch chimed again, signaling that the hour had gone by. Marzak called the Cobra crews on a hand radio and told them to prepare for an attack on the village. As he clicked off he heard a blatting sound that seemed to come from outside the village. He sprinted toward the chopper. The pilot and co-pilot were sitting in the doorway enjoying a cigarette. He snatched the cigarette from the pilot’s lips.

“Get this thing in the air!”

The startled co-pilot ditched his cigarette and the flight crew hastily climbed into the helicopter and took their seats in the cockpit. The mercenaries who had been lounging nearby got into the cabin with their weapons.

The professor was sitting in the shade of the chopper.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“We’re going to punish Hawkins and his friends.”

The professor paled. “I’ll stay here,” he said. He pointed to his head. “Air sickness.”

“Suit yourself.” Marzak vaulted into the cabin.

The engine cranked into action and the chopper rose into the air and hovered a hundred feet off the ground with its nose pointed toward the village. Marzak put on his communications headset and leaned out the side window. The spinning blades had kicked up a cloud of dust.

He reached forward and clamped a big hand on the pilot’s shoulder.

“Higher. I can’t see a damned thing.”

The chopper lifted higher until it was above the dust.

He was pleased to see that the Cobras were aloft, noses pointed toward the village. He was about to give the command to attack when he saw a strange silhouette clawing its way into the air above the low buildings.

Marzak couldn’t believe his eyes. An ungainly twin-engine biplane of impressive size was slowly circling over the rooftops. It had two sets of landing gear and a British air force insignia was painted on the boxy, chocolate-colored fuselage and mustard-hued wings. The plane was a couple of hundred feet off the ground, flying unevenly, pitching and yawing as if buffeted by a strong wind. Marzak spotted a gunner’s pulpit in the nose, ahead of the pilot. The sun reflected off the metal helmet worn by someone sitting in the cockpit.

Before Marzak could bark a command, the biplane broke out of its circling pattern and did the unexpected. It flew directly toward the chopper, allowing for a clearer view of the man in the pulpit.

He was wearing an odd-looking helmet that covered the top and sides of his head, but Marzak immediately recognized the broad grin on the dark-complexioned face under the visor. Marzak was amazed at Hawkins’ audacity, but pinning his hopes on that old flying crate was going to be his last mistake.

Marzak told the pilot to bring the helicopter around to position his men for a broadside attack.

During the hour Marzak was waiting, Amir passed out the operational Stinger missiles to the two men on the rooftop. He gave them instructions, made them repeat his words, and translated back into English for Hawkins and Calvin.

Moving at amazing speed, considering his age and damaged leg, Amir led the way down the stairs and got in his car with Hawkins and Calvin speeding behind him in the desert vehicle. A minute later they pulled up in front of Amir’s house, which was swarming with armed guards and dozens of women and children who’d gathered there for shelter.

Cait was busy trying to comfort Amir’s granddaughter, who had been crying with fright. The little girl calmed down when she saw her grandfather. Cait waved at Hawkins while Abby stepped off the porch and cut a path through the women and wailing children to greet Matt.

“What’s going on, Matt?”

“They called a truce. They want us to dive on the treasure. I said I would do it.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry; it was only an excuse to buy time. We need you to organize these people and get them ready to move to the agricultural sheds while Calvin and I prepare a distraction.”

“What sort of distraction?” Abby said.

Hawkins knew Abby wouldn’t settle for an evasive answer. “Something that’s risky as hell and may not work, Abby, but we’ve only got forty-five minutes to pull it together, so please don’t press me on this.”

Abby pinioned him with a level gaze. “You’d damn better watch your ass, Hawkins, because I’m going to pull rank and insist that you have dinner with me before anyone else.”

“I never argue with a superior officer,” Hawkins gave her a quick hug.

He went over to the dune buggy and Calvin handed him his CAR-15. Calvin had attached an M-203 grenade launcher — basically a fifteen-inch-long aluminum tube and breech — to the underside of the barrel.

Hawkins waved at Amir to signal that the operation was under way. Amir kissed his family good-bye, conferred with a couple of his lieutenants, then got into his car with the omnipresent bodyguards. The touring car led the way to the Folly of Empire museum.

The group bustled past the weapons display and the Soviet vehicles into the airplane hangar. Amir’s men opened the wide doors leading out to the airstrip. Hawkins looked at his watch.

Thirty-five minutes.

Calvin climbed into the cockpit and familiarized himself with the controls. Hawkins got in the tank-like combat vehicle and started the engine. The sound was throaty but smooth. Maneuvering the massive vehicle was a challenge. Amir directed with waves of his cane and Hawkins drove it out of the hangar, backing it up to the front of the plane. Two cables were hooked up to the vehicle’s rear bumper and the other ends attached to the twin landing gear carriages under the plane.

Hawkins began to accelerate the vehicle slowly, moving the plane inch by inch until it was out in the open. The cables were unhooked and he drove the vehicle to the side and trotted back into the hangar. Calvin was walking around the plane, making a visual inspection.

“Ready?” Hawkins said.

“Amir’s head mechanic assures me that the engines are in excellent working order.”

Hawkins glanced at the grease-stained man talking animatedly with Amir. “Then why does he look so nervous?”

“You don’t really want me to spell it out for you, do you Hawk?”

“No I don’t.”

Amir had finished talking to his mechanic and hobbled over.

“My mechanic says he will ask Allah to protect you. In case He chooses not to, gentlemen, and your plan goes awry, what do you suggest as a back up?”

“It’s a win-win situation, Amir,” Hawkins said. “Whether we go down in flames or not, the distraction will allow you to get the villagers to the shed. Have your men lay down the heaviest fire possible. If they can nail a couple of the choppers, the others will turn tail. Sorry I can’t give you better odds than that.”

“They are better than I expected.” Amir glanced at his watch. “You’ve got ten minutes.”

Hawkins said, “I have a strange request to make, Amir.”

Nothing these two Americans did would surprise Amir. He listened, simply nodded his head and ordered one of his men to carry out the request.

They shook hands with Amir and climbed onto the lower wing. Calvin got into the cockpit while Hawkins snugged into the tight forward pulpit and placed the CAR-15 between his knees.

Two men had been designated to start the propellers. The man on the right wing pulled the blade down, putting all his weight into the motion. Calvin fed fuel to the engine with the throttle. The man jumped out of the way as the wooden propeller rotated in a lazy spin that rapidly picked up speed. The man on his left went through the same exercise. The engines were attached to the fuselage only a few feet from the open cockpits and their sound was brain-scrambling.

The man Amir had dispatched to carry out Hawkins’ request climbed onto the wing and handed him the Macedonian bronze helmet from the small arms exhibit.

Hawkins handed him his cap and pulled the helmet on. It was tight, especially around the nose guard, but it fit. The helmet would offer protection from the wind blast in the pulpit, but he was hoping at the same time that he’d benefit from its warrior spirit. He was going to need any edge he could get.

He raised his thumb in the classic OK. Calvin mimicked the gesture and fed more fuel to the carburetors. The plane crept forward. Calvin had difficulty balancing the three-hundred-sixty-horsepower Rolls-Royce engines, and the plane zigzagged in a crab-like fashion as it rolled toward the start of the landing strip. He didn’t want to lose momentum, so he gunned the throttles as soon as the bomber was pointing, more or less, at the landing strip. The plane rumbled ahead at a fast run.

Hawkins put his sunglasses on to block the air blasting in his eyes. As the plane picked up speed, he bounced up and down on the hard seat as if he were sitting on a diving board. He squinted down the length of the landing strip. The plane had eaten up at least half the distance, but it seemed reluctant to leave the safety of the ground. They were bearing down on the end of the airstrip when the hundred-foot-span wings caught the air and the wheels lifted.

The plane was slow in gaining altitude and cleared the tops of the hills at the end of the runway by just a few yards. Calvin managed to keep the nose at the right pitch to allow for a climb without stalling and they were a couple of hundred feet in the air by the time they passed over the village. Hawkins had a good view of the four helicopters placed around the town. He saw figures running for the Blackhawk.

The mechanical obstacles of getting an ancient aircraft aloft and keeping it there were minor compared to Hawkins’ skill at judging human nature. He had bet their lives on the guess that Marzak would want Hawkins all for himself. And that he would want to make the kill at close range, maybe even toy with him, before he blew him to pieces. He almost shouted for joy when the Blackhawk lifted off the ground. He signaled Calvin to break out of their circle.

The bomber made an agonizingly wide and very slow banking turn, waggling its wings like a gull testing the updrafts, and straightened out so that it was on a course for the rising helicopter. As the dust cleared, Hawkins saw a figure on the ground where the helicopter had been. Hawkins was close enough to see that it was Professor Saleem. He had his doubts about the professor, but he was glad the man was not on the Blackhawk, because he intended to blow it out of the sky.

The Blackhawk pivoted, presenting its side in an easy target. Calvin had added a separate sighting system that snapped onto Hawkins’ rifle. Hawkins wrapped his right hand around the magazine and tried to steady the weapon as he squinted down the barrel at the helicopter.

Looking through his binoculars, Marzak saw Hawkins raise the CAR-15 over the cowling and his grin of triumph immediately faded as he recognized the dangerous significance of the thick tube slung under the barrel.

“He’s got a grenade launcher!” he yelled at the pilot. “Evade! Evade!”

The pilot acted immediately, moving the control stick to the right. The chopper leaned over into the start of a roll a second before a puff of white smoke blossomed at the front of the bomber. The projectile missed the tilted belly of the chopper by inches.

The pilot’s reaction had saved the aircraft, but the helicopter banked at a dangerous angle and he fought to get it under control. As the chopper regained stability, Marzak called the Cobras on his hand radio and ordered them to call off the impending attack on the village. The Blackhawk turned and flew away from the village.

“Where are you going?” he shouted at the pilot.

“I wasn’t hired for aerial combat,” the pilot said.

Marzak drew his pistol from its holster and held it to the pilot’s head. “You can sign a new contract when we’re through. I want you to attack.”

“Shoot me and we all die,” the pilot said.

“I don’t care,” Marzak said.

The pilot offered no further argument, and brought the chopper around again so it faced the village.

The Cobras leapt into the air on three sides of the village. Marzak ordered them to go after the new target. It wouldn’t be as satisfying as bringing Hawkins down himself, but he’d have a ringside seat for his enemy’s last moments.

The helicopters flanking the slow-moving plane hovered in a hold for a moment, allowing the bomber to fly between them, and then they accelerated into a flaring climb. The tactic, called a stern conversion, would put them in position for a fast diving attack from the rear. But as they slowed to swivel into a turn, they were prime targets for the Stinger missiles that streaked into the sky from rooftops at the edge of the village.

Two Cobras exploded in bright yellow and red bursts of flame, disintegrating into fiery showers of charred metal that rained down on the village. The bomber was closing on the third, approaching it nose-to-nose.

The surviving Cobra suddenly veered off its trajectory, and darted away from the confrontation, rapidly becoming a black dot against the sky as it flew off toward the horizon.

The bomber lumbered on through the smoke-filled airspace that the gunship had occupied only seconds before.

Marzak watched as the plane made a big circle, passing over the professor. He saw Saleem wave at the big plane and noticed the return wave from Hawkins before the bomber arced back toward the village. A scowl crossed his face. He hadn’t trusted the professor from the moment he had met him.

Marzak was tempted to attack the biplane, but there could be dozens of Stinger missiles ready to be launched from village rooftops and their fuel was running low. As much as he wanted Hawkins, his first priority was self-preservation. They would meet again and the next time Marzak would not be hindered by fools like the professor.

He would make sure of it right now.

Marzak told the pilot to turn back toward the figure below, and when the helicopter was in range, he stuck his rifle barrel out the window and fired. The professor, who had been waving at the approaching chopper, grabbed at his chest and crumpled to the ground.

The Blackhawk was out of sight by the time the bomber made a rough landing on the air strip and coasted to a stop.

Amir’s men crowded around the plane shouting in Pashto and firing their guns in the air as Hawkins and Calvin descended to the ground.

Amir came over and embraced them both.

“Thanks for the loan of the plane,” Hawkins said.

“Not a scratch on it,” Calvin added.

“That is more than I can say for our enemies!” Amir exulted. “I only wish we were able to kill every last one of them.”

They all piled in the car and headed toward the compound. As the car pulled up to Amir’s house, Hawkins saw someone in a dark olive uniform stretched out on the ground. Abby and Cait were kneeling next to the professor, applying a make-shift bandage in a vain attempt to staunch the bleeding from his gaping chest wound.

Hawkins vaulted from the car and knelt by the professor. He was still alive, but from the wheezing sound issuing from his gasping mouth, he would not last long.

“They found him in front of the village and brought him in a minute ago. He’s been calling for you,” Abby said.

Hawkins lifted the man’s head in his hand.

“I’m here,” he said.

Saleem seemed to revive. His hand reached out and grabbed the front of Hawkins’ shirt in a death grip.

Hawkins put his ear close to the professor’s mouth.

“I understand,” Hawkins said after a moment. “Thank you.”

The professor tried to respond, but his words came out as an incoherent rattle. He relaxed his grip on the shirt, his eyes rolled up in their sockets and his head lolled as if his neck were made of rubber.

“What did he say?” Cait said.

Hawkins gently closed the professor’s staring eyes. “He said that he was sorry.”

Amir surveyed the killing field on the far side of the lake, his gaze sweeping over the bullet-riddled bodies and the burned-out wreckage of the troop carrier. “It seems this Prester John treasure causes death wherever it goes. I would appreciate it if you removed the curse as quickly as possible.”

“We’ll start the search and survey as soon as we finish here,” Hawkins said.

“Then we had better get busy with our grim task,” Amir replied.

Amir supervised a work crew and Hawkins and Calvin helped collect the corpses so they could be transported by truck back to the village for a speedy burial according to Islamic custom. Amir stopped at one point to answer his chirping satellite phone. A smile replaced the frown on his face.

“One of my scouts reports that a ground force is a few miles from the village,” he said.

“Those must be the guys who were supposed to mop up after the choppers destroyed your village,” Hawkins said. “They don’t know that the air assault was a flop.”

“If you will excuse me, I must prepare a warm welcome for them,” Amir said.

“Need any help?”

“The spirits of the men who died here will guide our hand,” Amir said. Before getting into his car he said, “Thank you both for preventing this from happening to my village. Miss Abby and Dr. Cait have been a great help to the women and children.”

“Glad to hear that. Could you send them back to give us a hand with the dive?”

Amir nodded, then put the car in gear and led the truck with its load of dead bodies back to the village. Hawkins and Calvin did a damage assessment. Calvin poked around the shredded remains of the tents and picked up a bullet-punctured MRE.

“It’s not all bad news,” he said. “My jambalaya ingredients may have survived.”

“We’ll have to put it off for now. Fido’s hungry.”

They plugged a compressor into the generator to refill their air tanks, changed the batteries in the Pegasus units and laid out their dive gear. As they were preparing to suit up, Abby and Cait arrived in the Russian jeep.

“We ran into Amir on our way here,” Abby said. “He said you were looking for us.”

Cait glanced around at the blasted campsite. “We saw the bodies coming back to the village. It’s hard to believe the destruction.”

“Amir thinks it’s the curse of Prester John,” Hawkins said. “I promised him that we’d dive on the treasure as soon as possible. We’re about ready to check out the lake and could use a couple of dive tenders.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Abby said. She turned to Calvin. “Would you mind if I made the first dive? I promised myself that I would see this mission through to the very end. I’ve passed the SEAL dive course with flying colors, of course.”

Calvin shrugged. “Makes sense, Matt. I’d be more comfortable up here keeping an eye peeled for outlaws.”

“I would too, Cal. Let’s see if we can fit Abby out in your suit.”

Abby started to peel her clothes off. “Avert your eyes, gentlemen.”

The dry-suit sagged on her athletic body, but it would do the job of warding off the chill. With Calvin and Cait lending a hand, Hawkins and Abby slipped into the lake and tested their communications system, which allowed them to keep in touch with Calvin as well. Then they let the Pegasus thrusters propel them down the underwater slope. In the light from their flashlights, they saw that the boulder had disappeared, leaving an opening about eight-by-eight feet square.

Hawkins said, “There’s a big hole where the boulder used to be, Cal. The booby trap explosion must have crumbled the lower ledge of the hole. Plug popped right out of the drain.”

He flicked the beam of his flashlight at the opening and turned to Abby. “Shall we?”

Abby jerked her thumb in the air and with a series of strong flutter kicks she swam ahead of Hawkins. They passed through the opening into a tunnel which made a gradual turn to the right after a hundred feet. They were rounding the curve when Abby stopped so suddenly that Hawkins crashed into her.

“Hell, Abby!” Hawkins said as they untangled their arms and legs.

She made no reply, but instead pointed at the apparition blocking the way.

The figure with a bulbous one-eyed head was framed in the yellow twin halos cast by their flashlights. The thick arms and legs made a slight waving movement that gave the illusion of life.

They swam closer. The vacant sockets of a copper-hued skull peered at them through the glass of the circular visor.

“Guess we found Kurtz’s diver,” Hawkins said. “Time frame for the design of his gear is about right for the expedition. That’s a Schrader helmet manufactured around 1918. I’ve got a similar one in my collection.”

The diver’s weighted boots had torn away from the rubberized canvas suit and the bottoms of the legs were fringed like an oriental rug. The bronze helmet and breastplate had lost their shine and were a dull brown. A couple of feet of thick black air hose dangled from the back of the helmet. The suit hung from the end of rubber-encased chain attached to the back of the breastplate.

The chain emerged from a hole in the ceiling that was packed with rocks large and small. There were more rocks below the diver on the mine floor. “Looks like the shaft caved in and cut off his air,” Hawkins said.

Abby squeezed Hawkins by the arm. “What an awful way to die,” she said.

“He never had a chance. Cait saw the other end of the hose when she explored the shaft from ground level. The fact that he made it this far means Kurtz accessed the tunnel and maybe the treasure.”

“Yes, but was this the first dive or the last?” Abby said.

“That question may soon be answered. Let’s keep going.”

The discovery had tempered Abby’s enthusiasm to be in the lead. They swam abreast past the forlorn figure only to stop again. The tunnel was blocked by a mound of earth that reached to within a few feet of the ceiling.

“It’s going to be a tight squeeze,” Hawkins said.

“We’ve come too far to turn back,” Abby said.

“If I can make it through you’ll have no problem,” Hawkins said.

He swam up to the opening, which was about a yard wide. The ceiling seemed solid enough. He extended his arms like Superman in flight. Slight kicks of his fins propelled him forward inches at a time. The beam of his flashlight showed that the way actually widened after a few yards. He kept moving, crawling more than swimming. Seconds later he was through the opening. He turned around and waved his light.

“I’m in,” he said. “Come ahead.”

Abby navigated the passage with the ease of an eel. Hawkins tried to call Calvin, but there was no answer. They were too deep in the tunnel for their communications systems to work. They encountered no further obstructions and covered ground rapidly. After another fifty feet or so the tunnel ended abruptly in a wall. A rock shelf jutted out and behind the ledge was a large alcove around six feet long and two feet deep.

Hawkins flashed the light around the floor and walls of the empty tunnel.

“Looks like we’ve hit a dry hole, Abby,” he said in a rueful voice.

“Damnit, Matt. Kurtz got it all.”

Hawkins floated up so that he was level with the ledge and peered into the alcove. He drew his sheath knife and poked the biggest of several lumps lying in the recessed shelf. Within moments he had exposed a skull. The mud that had preserved it had colored the skull a dark brown.

“There are bones here,” Hawkins said. “Someone laid out a body for burial.”

He used his knife to peck away at the other chunks of concretion. The point quickly dislodged layers of hardened mud and revealed fragments of leg or arm bones. Hawkins brushed away some of the sediment and saw something shiny in the skeletal remains. He picked up an encrusted object that had a glint of gold, showed it to Abby, then put the object into his vest pocket.

Abby glanced at her wrist computer. “We’d better get back. Our friends are going to worry if they don’t hear from us.”

Hawkins signaled Abby to take the lead. She approached the earth barrier blocking the way and glided up and through the opening. Hawkins was right behind her. He watched her as she wiggled through, surprising himself with the thought that her backside looked good even in Calvin’s oversized wetsuit.

When they emerged from the water a few minutes later, they saw Calvin and Cait waiting at the lake’s edge. Hawkins crawled out and wasted no time with his report. “We found an old tomb that lies directly under the shaft and discovered what was left of the diver and another body, much older, that was apparently laid out for burial.” Hawkins hated to break Cait’s heart with the truth, but he had to be up front with her. “There was no treasure,” he said.

Cait seemed to shrink within herself.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “The tunnel ends around a hundred-fifty-feet in. We went over every square foot.”

“Then that’s it.” Her words had a hollow ring. She looked around at the devastation. “All this was for nothing.”

“Maybe not. We found this with the older skeleton.” He removed the lump from his vest and handed it to Cait. She examined the object, then borrowed a knife and carefully chipped away the chunk of concretion. Underneath was a gold cross. Cait translated the inscription on the long part of the cross:

“GOD SPEED PHILLIP”

Inscribed on the cross’ short section was the word ALEXANDER.

“You were wrong about finding nothing,” she said. “The skeleton you discovered belongs to Philip. It proves my theory that he made it as far as Afghanistan.” She pursed her lips in thought. “What it doesn’t prove is whether he was coming from or going to the kingdom of Prester John. Maybe we’ll never know now, but even without the treasure, this is one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the century.”

Hawkins’ eye fell on the piece of concretion that had broken off from the cross. He took the knife back and chipped away the covering. Inside was a coin. He examined the palm tree engraved one side and then flipped the coin over.

“I’m happy to say that you’re wrong, Cait,” he said. “Looks like the cross will be the second most important discovery. This is the first.”

He gave Cait the coin. She studied both sides, then passed it to Abby, threw her arms around Hawkins and planted a warm kiss on his lips.

Abby was irritated at Cait’s reaction until she examined the coin. She understood after she examined the side of the coin with the face pictured on it. Engraved in Latin under the profile were two words.

Hawkins gave the order to break camp. They loaded the gear onto the desert vehicle and with the Russian Jeep leading the way, headed back to Amir’s house. His daughter greeted them and said they had been invited for dinner and to stay the night.

After being shown to their rooms and given the chance to clean up and change, they assembled for dinner in the big dining room. Amir arrived a few minutes later. He sat down next to Cait and said that his men had ambushed a force advancing on the village. All the invaders were killed, he said.

“My men have been buried and avenged on the same day.” He turned to Hawkins. “And did you find the treasure my friend?”

Before Hawkins could answer, Amir noticed that Cait’s eyes were moist with tears. He put his hand on her arm. “What’s wrong, Dr. Cait? Are you ill?”

Cait cleared her throat. “I’m fine, thank you. No, that’s not right. I feel terrible. It was my research that led to the deaths of so many people. If I hadn’t come up with my treasure theory, your men would still be alive.”

There was a heavy silence in the room.

Hawkins had gone through a self-hatred phase and knew that once guilt got its claws into you it was hard to dislodge.

“Not so fast, Cait,” he said. “You didn’t ask that creep to attack you at the caravan stop. You didn’t murder the men at the lake. You didn’t attack the village. You have no right to blame yourself.”

Her pale cheeks flushed pink. “That’s easy for you to say, Matt.”

“It’s not easy, Cait. Not easy at all.”

Calvin jumped into the discussion. “What Hawk is saying as that we’ve both been there. He thought it was his fault that we lost guys in an ambush back in the day. I tore myself up for years because I didn’t have his back when they pushed him out of the navy.”

Abby sighed loudly. “Guess I should get on the guilt band wagon. I could have tended to a deeply-wounded friend and I didn’t.” Abby turned her head to avoid Hawkins’ surprised gaze and spoke directly to Cait. “What we’re all saying is that you can’t blame yourself for the actions of a bunch of sleaze-bags.”

Cait threw her hands in the air. “Enough! I didn’t know this was going to be an intervention. Okay, I absolve myself of blame, but the Prester John treasure still had a role in this.”

“I agree,” Hawkins said. “But Prester was only one in a cast of dozens. Let’s not forget the professor or the twin assassins who tried to kill me.”

“I never suspected that Professor Saleem was an agent with the Pakistani intelligence. I feel so betrayed,” Cait said. “He always seemed like the perfect gentleman scholar.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what he was,” Hawkins said. “Marzak must have suspected he was on our side, and that’s probably why he killed him.”

“Saleem’s connection to the Shadows is not surprising,” Amir said. “The ISI maintains contacts with terrorists and insurgents which it sees as buffers against the greater enemy. India.”

“Where does Marzak fit in?” Calvin asked.

Hawkins said, “Marzak was running the military operation for the Shadows. The professor suggested he was more than just a soldier for hire like the others.”

“What did he mean?”

“Marzak’s role is more complicated. He and his twin tried to kill me, which suggests that they wanted to torpedo our mission even before it started. Somehow, they knew about the operation.”

“I don’t get it. How could that happen?” Calvin said.

Hawkins laughed. “Because the security surrounding our top-secret expedition seems to have sprung more leaks than the Titanic. I suggest we go back to the beginning, the Prester John legend, and carry it to the present,” Hawkins said. “As our resident historian, you have the podium, Dr. Everson.”

A smile came to Cait’s face. She was happy to be back on familiar territory. She went to her room for her computer, placed it on the table and pushed back the cover.

“I’ll run through what we know. Let’s go back to the 1100s. Rumors of Prester John circulate in Europe. The Pope writes a letter to John suggesting an alliance and entrusts it with his personal physician, a man named Philip. That fact is well recorded. So is the fact that he made it as far as Jerusalem. He disappears from sight after that. Now we know what happened to him. Defying the odds, Philip apparently found the lost kingdom of Prester John.”

She opened an image on the computer.

“This is a fragment of the vellum scroll that Kurtz found in Kabul. On the front is part of a letter Philip carried from Prester John to the Pope, in which he mentions a gift that will allow for an alliance that will rally the troops against the infidels.”

“The emerald scepter,” Hawkins said.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Abby said. “The Shadows want to use it for the same purpose, to rally people to their flag.”

Cait nodded. “History is merely the same things happening over and over. On his return trip, Philip passes through the caravan stop and sees the wall map showing a short cut to the Mediterranean coast. Somehow, he strays off the intended route into a box canyon named the Valley of the Dead, a region thick with bandits. For whatever reason, Philip takes refuge in a tomb where he dies. He or someone else draws a map on the back of the vellum and hundreds of years later, it ends up in Kabul where Kurtz finds it. Finally, we find the coin, which may have been placed on his eyes as was the custom.”

“The coin proves that the treasure made it to the mine with Philip,” Abby said.

“And raises the question of what became of the rest of the treasure,” Calvin said.

Hawkins said, “You’ve got a couple of narratives here. Philip’s story and Kurtz’s expedition. The tomb is the nexus where those two story lines meet.”

“So old Hiram ran off with the treasure?” Calvin said.

“Let’s look at what we know about his expedition,” Cait said. “Kurtz was looking for the Prester John treasure. We know too, from the chisel we found, that he was at the caravan stop. He sees the map of the Silk Road trade routes and uses it to track down the Prester John caravan route.”

“But first he obliterates the location of Prester’s kingdom with a chisel so no one will follow in his footsteps,” Hawkins said.

“Exactly,” Cait agreed. “He heads for the valley and finds that it is now a lake. That’s when he calls in a diver who goes into the lake, but the tomb is blocked. Using the camel’s back hill as a reference, Kurtz drills a shaft to the tomb, which is flooded.”

“We saw what’s left of the diver,” Hawkins said. “It’s clear that the mine shaft collapsed and plugged up access. But when Abby and I entered the shaft, there was no treasure, which suggests that Kurtz found it before the cave-in. Based on the historical house of cards we’ve built, if we follow Kurtz, we’ll find the treasure.”

“I’m not sure if I even care about the treasure anymore,” Cait said. “I have my proof in the cross and the coin. The scepter has caused so much misery.”

“It’s likely to cause a lot more misery if the competition gets its hands on it,” Hawkins said. “The professor told me that Marzak is going to carry out the Shadows’ plot in the U.S. as soon as he finds the treasure.”

“Exactly what sort of plot is this?” Abby said.

“Marzak has planted sarin bombs near U.S. population centers. The professor didn’t know where, only that Marzak will trigger the explosives once he has the scepter in hand. As you said, Abby, the Shadows want to use the historic symbolism of the emerald scepter to rally extremists to their cause.”

“Sarin is one of the deadliest substances on earth,” Calvin said in a hushed tone. “Tens of thousands of people could die if this thing goes down.”

“Damn,” Abby said. “We can’t let that happen.”

“No argument there,” Hawkins said. “We have to leave tomorrow as early as possible.”

“How can we stop it, Matt?”

“Simple. We find the scepter before Marzak does.”

Sutherland’s internal alarm clock went off at four o’clock in the morning. She switched on the light next to the bed and noticed her newly-laundered jeans, shirt, and underwear stacked on a chair. She dressed and went out to the patio. The temperature had dropped drastically during the night, and she could see her breath. The stars were like sapphires in black velvet. She focused on the North Star. Polaris seemed to beckon.

She went back inside, grabbed her computer bag and went to the kitchen where she wrote a long note thanking the McHughs and promising to keep in touch. She put on her leather jacket, wheeled the motorcycle out of the car port, but didn’t start the engine until she was a hundred feet from the house. She headed north on the empty highway. The sun was coming up as she passed through the outskirts of Tucson.

As she rode along, she formed a plan of sorts to lose herself in Utah’s vast back country, but she had an epiphany in the Navajo town of Chinle where she stopped to buy the makings for a picnic. She rode a few miles to Canyon de Chelly, pulled into the parking lot and walked out onto a bluff that overlooked the red sandstone walls of the ancient canyon.

She sat with her feet dangling over a ledge and munched contentedly on a mountainous cold-cut sandwich, gazing off at the 800-foot tall column known as Spider Rock. Not far from where she sat, the Indian fighter Kit Carson had cornered the Navajos at the blind end of the canyon, and then he drove the ones he didn’t kill from their land. There was a lesson to be learned. No matter how fast and how far you run, you have to keep moving or you’ll eventually be cornered.

If she didn’t fight, she could end up with her back to the wall like the unfortunate Navajo.

She finished lunch, got on her motorcycle and headed north to Route 66, riding past the historic road’s commercial hodge-podge until she stopped at a motel with units built in the shape of concrete wigwams. A fifties vintage car sat in front of each unit. Her kind of place. After she registered, she went out for a supply of chips and Coke, then set up her computer in the circular bedroom. No danger of being cornered here.

She wrote an account of the last few days, in case the next attempt on her life was successful and sent the file to Hawkins. At the end she wrote the words: PLS CALL.

Sutherland backed up the file using an online data storage service, and pondered where she should point her investigation. It was too dangerous to snoop around Arrowhead. After a moment of thought, she opened the Prester John folder, clicked on the TREASURE file, and went down the index until she came to a name. Hiram Kurtz.

The Kurtz history was fairly linear. Originally from Minnesota, he had studied to be an accountant, but drifted into mining when he learned he had a knack for wringing wealth out of the earth. Photos of Kurtz in the heyday of his mining career showed him with a broad, determined face, high chiseled cheek bones and intelligent eyes outlined by circular-framed wire rim glasses.

An article from the society pages described his lavish wedding to a young and beautiful debutant named Priscilla Knudson. She came from an old New York family that had made scads of money at the Wall Street end of the mining industry. He began to spend less time near his mines in Colorado and more at the house he built for his new bride. Later photos showed his Hudson River mansion, and Kurtz and his wife with a young boy whose chubby face blended the features of his parents. They traveled abroad on trips that Kurtz explained later as triggering his interest in archaeology.

In a later article there was a reference to Kurtz’s late wife, which Sutherland followed to an obituary, saying Mrs. Kurtz had died giving birth to a second child, a daughter, who did not survive much longer than her mother.

The loss may have been the reason he threw himself into exploration, because after his wife died, he built a yacht to carry him to remote places and called it the Sweet Priscilla. It was this ship that carried him on his quest for Prester John’s treasure.

The story of the treasure hunt seemed straightforward. Eccentric mining tycoon bankrolls an archaeological expedition. Nobody hears from the expedition for months. Kurtz eventually emerges from the wilderness, only for his expedition team to perish in a shipwreck during the return journey. After that, Kurtz goes home, apparently having accomplished nothing.

Sutherland compared the earlier photos of Kurtz with one taken after his Afghan expedition. The difference in his appearance was striking. The healthy-looking middle-aged man with the confident expression had turned into a thin, hollow-cheeked caricature of himself. His eyes were vacant and staring, and maybe just a little mad.

She wasn’t surprised when she came across his obituary, dated a year after the expedition returned, saying he had died in Denver. With the loss of his archaeological staff at sea, Kurtz would have been the only one left with firsthand knowledge of what, if anything, the expedition had found. The secret died with him.

Sutherland sat back and gazed out the window at the rusting old Ford outside her wigwam. Something was odd about Kurtz’s demise. He looked to be at death’s door when he got back from Afghanistan. But he didn’t stay in his comfortable riverside mansion, close to the health care available in New York City. Instead, he had hopped onto his private railroad car and headed west.

The last story she found on Kurtz was written by a reporter who had ambushed him in Denver. The headline writer got in one final jab at the ailing tycoon before Kurtz disappeared into obscurity.

The article reported that when asked if he regretted squandering the lives of his expedition on a fruitless quest to find Amazons, Kurtz had answered that his quest had not been to look for Amazons — that had never been anything more than a line to amuse the media vultures — nor had his expedition been fruitless.

Sutherland pondered the wording of his last statement. Why not say he was going to give a good accounting of himself. Why give himself a good accounting? A good accounting of what? And what did he mean when he said the expedition had found knowledge? Kurtz was hiding something. She entertained the possibility that he had found the treasure, which meant that Hawkins and his friends were on a wild-goose chase. But if so, what happened to it?

She returned to his obituary and found the name of his son in the list of survivors. After a quick Google search she learned that Henry Knudson Kurtz had been a drunken playboy who had inherited his father’s mining company and subsequently run it into the ground. In one of his sober moments, he fathered a son who was named after his father, and he died at the age of thirty-eight of undetermined causes.

Sutherland did another search, typing in the name Henry Knudson Kurtz Junior. She was unprepared for the avalanche of results. Kurtz Junior was mentioned in hundreds of references, mostly unfavorable, as the leader of a paramilitary group named the Southwest Constitutional Militia.

Kurtz had been born in New York, studied law at an obscure southern college she had never heard of, was drafted into the army and served in a legal post in Vietnam. After his discharge, Kurtz tried to get into the FBI but his credentials were too thin. He started a one-man law practice in Denver that handled mostly cases of conspiracy and gun charges. The experience apparently convinced him the government was willing to override the Constitution to pursue its illegal aims.

He became adjutant general and legal counselor for an umbrella group that represented militias nationally and formed his own militia. On the website for his organization there was a photo of General Kurtz in a camouflage uniform, an automatic rifle cradled in his arms.

He had inherited the high cheekbones of his grandfather, but his face was narrower, and it was as creased as a piece of beef jerky. His mouth was a straight, thin line drawn across his prominent jaw. The caption described him as militia commander, and he had combined his first and last names, Hank and Kurtz, into a short hard version. Hak. Sounds like something a cat does with a fur ball, Sutherland thought.

Hak Kurtz’s declaration of the militia’s purpose was a long, rambling anti-government diatribe against the elites who were conspiring to enslave the U.S. by taking away the guns and the rights of the people. The website photos showed armed men and women in combat outfits going through training at an undisclosed site in Colorado.

Sutherland would love to see the expression on Matt’s face when he learned that this dangerous nut case might hold the key to the Prester John treasure. Even better would be his surprise if she tracked down the treasure. It was a measure of her mental state that she found it perfectly reasonable to even consider this.

The question was how to approach Kurtz. She went over old news clips and studied maps of the original Kurtz mine holdings. The more productive mines had been sold off to a big company, but Kurtz’s son had held onto the original, non-producing ones around Ouray, Colorado. She figured that’d be a good place for a militia. If she started early the next day, she could easily make Durango. Ouray was a relatively short drive through the mountains from there. What then? Go right up to the door and say she was looking for a lost treasure? Maybe she could figure something out on the ride.

She shut down her computer, slipped it into its case and left her wigwam to search for a GPS, more tortilla chips and Coke. She would head for Ouray in the morning.

The helicopter from Kabul had been delayed several hours by a security alert that grounded all civilian aircraft after a suicide bombing in the city. Amir used the time to show off the new school and water system he had built for his village. Eventually, he and his family gathered at the airstrip with their guests.

When the helicopter appeared, Amir said, “My family and I will be very sad to see all of you go.”

Hawkins conferred with Calvin in a low whisper and said to Amir, “We have an idea that may soften the blow.”

Hawkins handed the keys to Calvin’s desert vehicle to Amir, who said, “I don’t know how I can repay you.”

“How about letting me borrow your satphone again and we’ll call it even.”

Amir handed him the phone and told him to keep it. There were tearful good-byes, then everyone climbed aboard the helicopter. As the chopper lifted off and gained altitude, Hawkins saw the desert vehicle making tight figure eights and wondered it had been a mistake to give the fast little buggy to a lead foot like Amir.

There was little conversation on the flight to Kabul. The passengers were weary from their ordeal and the engine noise made conversation difficult even using headsets. Hawkins clicked on the satellite phone and tried to reach Sutherland so he could tell her everyone was in good shape. There was no answer. He connected to his own phone number, and retrieved a texted message she had sent the day the expedition left Kabul.

Hawkins clenched his jaw as he read on the small screen Sutherland’s description of the intricate web connecting Murphy to the ambush five years ago and the attempts on her life. He cursed himself for dragging the young woman into this mess, then leaving her to fend for herself. The helicopter landed in Kabul early in the evening. Abby said she planned to go to the Global Logistics Kabul office to line up a flight home and invited Cait to go along.

“We’ve got a few things to take care of. We’ll stay here,” Hawkins said.

As soon as the two women were out of earshot, Hawkins said, “Got a big favor to ask you, Cal.”

Calvin nodded as he listened to Hawkins’ request, then rummaged in his luggage and handed over a thin tube-shaped object.

“Pretty serious stuff,” Calvin said. “You going to need help?”

Hawkins slid the shiny cylinder into his pocket.

“Going solo on this one, Cal. Tell Abby I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

“What if Abby asks where you went?”

“Tell her I’m taking care of unfinished business.”

He bumped fists with Calvin, then strode off to find a taxi that would take him into the city.

Murphy was at the Serena Hotel bar. He had just emptied the contents of his hip flask into his third fruit juice and was enjoying the fiery-sweet flow of liquid down his throat, when a bellhop tapped his shoulder and handed him an envelope. Folded inside was a sheet of hotel letterhead and a printed message.

“Mission accomplished. Need to see you. No phone. Your place. Rashid.”

“Who gave you this?” Murphy said.

The bellhop touched the top of his head. “Bald man?”

Murphy tucked the note in his pocket, tipped the bell hop and slid off his stool. He made his way erratically through the lobby and out the door to the parking lot. He fumbled with the keys to his armored Chevy Tahoe SUV. As he heaved his bulky body behind the wheel, he heard the back door open and shut. A voice spoke in his ear:

“Hi, Southie. Remember me?”

Murphy glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw Hawkins’ manic grin. Struggling to keep the surprise out of his voice, the DEA agent said: “Hell, Hawk, scared the crap out of me. Didn’t know you were back in town. I guess the mission went okay.”

“The mission was fine.”

“That’s good, man. So what’re you doing here? I got a note to meet Rashid.”

“The note was from me. I told the bellhop to say it was from a bald man.”

“Uh, what happened to Rashid?”

“Why do you think anything happened to him?”

“Figure of speech. I got him the guide gig. Thought the ungrateful bastard wanted to thank me.”

“He can’t do that because he’s vulture bait.”

“Dead?”

“Very.”

“Jeez, what happened?”

“He got frisky with a lady friend of mine.”

“Oh hell. I should have warned you that he had a problem with women.”

“He had a problem with men, too. He tried to kill me and ran off with our dune buggy. I caught up with him.”

Murphy dropped his hands onto his knees. “Can’t say I really liked the guy.”

“Too bad, because you’re going to join him if you go for that gun between the seats. Pick it up by the butt with your thumb and forefinger and hold it over your shoulder. Please don’t make me shoot you.”

Murphy hesitated. “You’re bluffing. Security guys would never let you onto the hotel grounds with a firearm.”

“They’d let me get in with a special ops ball-point fitted out with a .22 caliber blank that will drive a dart into your brain. Real James Bond stuff, Murph.”

Murphy winced as a sharp object dug into the base of his skull. He followed Hawkins’ instructions, slowly handed the gun over his shoulder and put his hands back on the wheel.

“Glad you got the point. Now pass me the gun you carry in your belt holster.”

Murphy dug out the compact .22 backup pistol and handed it to Hawkins.

“Good memory. You don’t trust anyone, do you?”

Hawkins removed the magazines and emptied the rounds from each gun. “I don’t want any distractions. Tell me why you sicced Rashid on us.”

“Rashid was a last-minute desperation choice. I had to use the little pervert because I didn’t have time to put a better plan into place.”

“A plan for what?”

“To sabotage your mission.”

“Who gave you the orders?”

“Dunno. I get my assignments on the phone. Someone calls. A voice gives me an ID code so I’ll know it’s legit, and tells me what to do. I didn’t know what your mission was. Still don’t.”

“Did the voice tell you to kill me?”

“They used the word neutralize. Nothing personal.”

“That makes me feel better, Murph. Someone tried to neutralize me back in the States, even before the mission got underway. You know anything about that?”

“Whaddya know, something I didn’t do! I’m clueless on that score, Hawk. Maybe someone was afraid you’d dig into the past and stir things up. From what little I know, the guys I work for don’t like loose ends.”

“Were Abby and Cal considered loose ends, too?”

“Aw crap. Yeah,” he said.

“Were you working for the same voice when we met five years ago?”

“Hard to tell. Voice is computer-altered. Could have been anyone. I was a private contractor with the Company. You know that.”

“You were moonlighting for Arrowhead.”

The answer caught Murphy by surprise. “How did you know that?”

“Never mind.”

“Yeah, what’s the big deal? Arrowhead had contracts with the CIA.”

“What was your main job?”

“I was to develop local intelligence assets.” He chuckled. “Basically I got paid for hanging around the hotel lounge.”

“You did more than warm a bar stool. You cultivated Honest Abe as an informant. He was so important that he got wined and dined in New York. You were on his shopping trip to the Big Apple.”

“You do what you have to do in this business. You know that, Hawk.”

“All too well. Problem was, Honest Abe wasn’t so honest. While you were showing him the bright lights of Broadway, he had been giving CIA money to the Taliban for protection. That should have neutralized him, but he became even more valuable after you turned him into a double agent. How am I doing so far?”

“Spot on, Hawk. Like I said, it’s a crazy business.”

“It gets even crazier when I want to bring Honest Abe in to talk about a Taliban attack on a SEAL team. My superior says, ‘talk to Murphy first; he’s The Man.’ So that’s what I did.”

“I warned you Honest Abe was a protected asset, told you to stay away from him. Woulda saved a lot of trouble if you’d taken my advice. Like I said, he was valuable to us.”

“Understandable. After they picked the shrapnel out of my leg, I began to wonder how he knew we were coming.”

“Hard to keep a secret in these parts.”

“You’re the only one outside my superior officer who knew that I was contemplating a mission. You set us up, Murphy.”

“I warned the bastard to get out of town. He’s the one who decided to leave an IED.”

“Maybe you didn’t know Abe’s plans, but you told him we were coming and that’s just as bad.”

“Chrissakes, Hawk, that’s ancient history. Go home and stay there.”

“You’re starting to annoy me. I’m so annoyed that my finger might accidentally press the trigger. When I tried to find out how Abe knew I was coming, I ran into a brick wall. Tell me about the cover up.”

Murphy’s well-honed survival instincts told him that Hawkins was serious. The air seemed to go out of his body.

“You gotta go back to 9/11. Bin Laden’s bragging on TV after he knocked the towers down, mocking us, saying America was filled with fear. And he was right! Everybody was scared. We had to hit back in a hurry. You know how it is. The wolves respect a winner. If you’re seen as weak, it’s all over.”

“I was with a SEAL team that dispelled that notion,” Hawkins said.

“Damn straight! We really kicked ass. Invaded Afghan land and pushed out the Taliban. Took a while to catch up with Bin Laden, and there was a slight detour through Iraq, but that’s the stuff people knew about. There was a whole other war going on behind the scenes. Our guys decided that we had to fight dirty. Assassinations. Special rendition. Kidnapping.”

“Enhanced interrogation,” Hawkins added.

“I’m not afraid to call it what it was. Torture. But all the people wringing their hands don’t get the point. Water-boarding someone wasn’t expected to extract information. Anyone with half a brain knows you get more out of a source by giving him Twinkies and ice cream. It never was about intel.”

“So what was it about?”

“Revenge, Hawk. We wanted to send those bastards a message. You sucker punched us, but we’ve tossed out the Marquis de Queensbury rules. Mess around with the U.S.A. and we won’t just kill you, we’ll catch you and make you wish that you had never been born. You think they went after Bin Laden so they could bring him back and put him on trial? Hell no. He had a big fat bull’s-eye on his head.”

“So far, you haven’t told me anything new.”

“Try this on for size. The stuff that went public was only the tip of the iceberg. That was a CIA-contractor op that used legalese to back it up, but they couldn’t outright ignore the law. That was the job of a small sub-group within the larger operation.”

“What could this group do that the others couldn’t?”

“Pretty much anything they wanted to do.”

“Oversight?”

“Open-end approval at the highest level with minimal oversight. Deniability was important. If they got caught, they’d say it was a rogue operation.”

“Risky. With no control, it could very well go rogue.”

“It was a risk the top level was willing to take. They wanted the bad guys to know that there were things worse than death.”

“How big was the group?”

“Maybe six core people with on-call access to support. They called themselves Archer. Codeword for the guy who calls me is Arrowsmith.”

“Archer. Arrowhead. Arrowsmith. Cute.”

“Arrowhead was both the cover and the contractor. They set up an entity to take care of logistics, payroll and all that.

“The Arrowhead kids’ program.”

“That’s right. Very impressive, Hawk. No one would suspect an outfit that helped kids.”

“Where was Trask in all of this?”

“The unit needed a resident shrink with no scruples.”

“He fits the bill. Tell me about Captain McCormick. Where does he fit in?”

“He was with the original black ops team and moved over to the unit.”

“Did he have a role in getting me kicked out of the SEALs?”

“Probably. He was navy intel, but still attached to Archer. When the torture story went public, everyone went to the mattresses. CIA burned the videos of the torture sessions. Records were destroyed. The spin-masters came out and started spreading disinformation. Meanwhile, the Archer unit scattered to the four winds.”

“Trask was on the government payroll when he saw me.”

“He was in a holding pattern. A shrink in Oklahoma had dug up some stuff on Trask about his involvement with torture and tried to get him hauled up on professional misconduct. The charges were dropped when his accuser died in a house fire.”

“Of suspicious origin, no doubt.”

“Yeah, shit happens, Hawk. One more shrink won’t be missed.”

“What was your role, Murphy?”

“Arrowhead sub-contracted out my services. You don’t want to know the details. Water-boarding and sexual humiliation was for amateurs. Some stuff was real medieval. All that was missing was a black hood. I’ve got a strong stomach, but I had to get out. They got me a job with the DEA as a reward for my work. And here I am.”

Murphy took Hawkins’ silence as a signal that the conversation was over.

“That sums it up, Hawk. Can I go back to the bar now?”

“Shut up.” He prodded Murphy with the pen gun. “Why was Trask picked to process my psychiatric discharge?”

“Ambushing you and your guys was never in the works. Honest Abe pulled that stunt on his own to protect a stash of opium. But once you started asking questions that could have exposed the connection to Archer, you had to be stopped.”

“So they decided that the best way to stop me was to say I was crazy.”

“Hell, we’re all crazy in this business. I was just a hired goon. I haven’t heard from them in years until last week when they called. I was surprised as hell that you were coming back.”

“It sounds as if Archer is still in business and calling the shots.”

“It’s been reconstituted to deal with an evolving threat.”

“Talk English, Murphy.”

“We’ve hurt the bad guys. Drone attacks have kicked the crap out of the hierarchy. Killing Bin Laden was the icing on the cake, but we’ve had to contend with a new reality. The leadership is more diffused, with splinter groups showing their muscle.”

“Groups like the Shadows?”

“Don’t know why I’m talking, Hawk. You already know everything.”

“What makes the Shadows so dangerous?”

“No one knows who they are, for one thing. They’ve been hurt real bad and they want to hurt us. They think if they can do that it’ll give the radicals a leg up in some of the Arab countries that are torn between democracy and extremism. Security made it harder to get men into the States, so they started looking for other ways to cause problems at home and in Europe. Real whack-a-mole. We had to come up with new ways to deal with their evolving tactics.”

“Start bringing me home, Murphy. My hand is getting real tired.”

“Patience, man. We heard chatter about the Shadows growing, getting stronger. Archer was brought together again and expanded. It’s got some of the same people, but it’s more like a think tank with muscle.”

“Arrowhead still provides the brawn?”

“That’s my understanding.”

“Who provides the brains?”

“Classified. All I know is that the unit’s job is to squash the plot in the U.S. and deliver a KO punch against the Shadows.”

Hawkins remembered Sutherland’s report mentioning the death of Honest Abe. “I heard Abe has left this world.”

“He was killed in a DEA operation a couple of days ago.”

“Quite the coincidence.”

“Karma. He’s dead, Hawk. You can go home and forget about all this.”

Hawkins felt a twinge in his damaged leg.

“I might be able to forget that you set me up for an ambush, Murphy, and that trusting Honest Abe was just plain stupidity on your part.”

“You don’t have to get insulting, Hawk.”

“Here’s the thing. You tried to set me up a second time, and that’s unforgivable.”

“It was you or me, Hawk. I didn’t have any choice.”

“Yes, but I do. I’m going to choose not to kill you.”

Murphy puffed out his cheeks. “Damn, Hawk, I knew you couldn’t pull the trigger.”

Hawkins opened the door and stepped out. He skidded the guns under the car and tossed the ammunition as far as he could into the parking lot. “I’m sure you can get more ammo. You may be needing it. As you said. What goes around comes around.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Think about it. You screwed up. My mission was a success. I’m still alive. You said these folks don’t like loose ends. You know too much. Bang.”

“Maybe it’s time for old Murph to head for warmer climes.”

“They’ll find you and kill you, Murphy. But I may be able to help. They want something I’ve got. The deal is, you’ve got to do something for me.”

“I’m listening.”

“Tell your handlers we’ve talked, that I have what they want and will trade it for the guys who got me kicked out of the navy. Trask and McCormick for starters. I want their heads on a platter.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“I want you to be the middle-man. At the least, it will buy you time to make yourself scarce. Call my number at Woods Hole and leave a message when you hear back.”

“It’s a deal, man. No hard feelings?”

“This is a crazy business. Your words. One more question. Where does Marzak figure in all this?”

“Who?”

Murphy’s surprise seemed genuine. Hawkins told him to forget it and got out of the car.

Murphy shook his head. “You spooked me with an old Bic, didn’t you?”

Hawkins pointed the pen and pressed the trigger. There was a pop and the dart thunked into the metal just below the open window.

“Wrong again, Murph.”

Abby had been watching for Hawkins from the doorway of the Global Logistics Technologies plane. She saw him striding across the tarmac toward the jumbo jet and almost tripped in her haste to meet him at the bottom of the stairway.

Her eyes were narrowed, her jaw set and her lips compressed. She seemed to be searching for something in his face.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Is everything okay?”

“You tell me, Matt. Calvin said you went into Kabul on an errand.”

“I wanted to talk to Murphy. I had questions I needed answers to.”

“I have to know, Matt. Did you kill him?”

“No, Abby. It wasn’t worth it. We just talked.”

Her features transformed from granite hardness back to flesh and bone.

“Damnit, Hawk!” she said, eyes brimming with tears. “I thought you’d gone off the deep end. You are the biggest pain in the ass.”

Unexpectedly, she threw her arms around him and gave him a kiss on the neck that sent a tingle down to his toenails.

“I’ll have to not kill someone more often,” he said. “Let’s go home.” He took her by the hand and started walking to the plane.

Calvin and Cait were already in the upper deck cabin. As Hawkins settled into the seat next to Cait, his friend hiked his eyebrows and drew his forefinger across his neck. Hawkins silently mouthed a no, which brought a wide grin from Calvin.

Abby sat next to Calvin and they all clicked their seat belts. Minutes later, the 747 was rumbling down the runway, engines at full blast as they lifted the massive plane into the skies. The sprawling city receded into the distance.

“So long, Afghan land,” Calvin murmured. “We’ll never forget you.”

Hawkins felt his leg twinge again. “That’s for damned sure.”

The Blackhawk helicopter carrying Marzak made it back to the desert fuel dump on fumes. After refueling, the helicopter continued east over the border and put down at the field near the Doctor’s house. The pilot had radioed ahead and the Doctor was waiting.

He listened to Marzak’s account of the failed mission and the death of Saleem. “A pity,” the Doctor said without feeling. “We must consider our next step.”

“I will continue to pursue the treasure.”

“My preference would be to find the treasure, but if that’s impossible, it may be best to proceed with hanging the Prophet’s Necklace around the throat of America.”

Marzak didn’t trust the Doctor. Once he had outlived his usefulness, the Shadows might decide that his continued existence might expose them to danger. There was something else. He wanted the treasure and he wanted Hawkins more than the payment for carrying out the plot.

“I will connect the strands as soon as I return to the U.S. I want to be there to follow up in case anything goes wrong.”

The Doctor frowned, verifying Marzak’s suspicion that he was expendable. “Do it as soon as possible, then.”

The Doctor gave him a manly hug, then Marzak boarded the helicopter and was flown to the military base that had been a springboard for his mission. An ISI executive jet was waiting to fly Marzak and the remnants of his mercenary team to Islamabad. The news of Saleem’s death had traveled ahead, and the professor’s cousin Mohamed was at the military airport when the jet touched down. He took Marzak aside as soon as he disembarked.

“What happened to my cousin Saleem?”

“The sheik was waiting for us with ground-to-air missiles,” Marzak said. “After his people destroyed the helicopters, Hawkins shot Saleem down like a dog.”

“Poor Saleem. I should never have sent him on the mission.”

“He fought back with everything he had, but in the end it made no difference. Unfortunately, we were unable to retrieve his body because of the intense fire.”

“Of course. I don’t blame you. Well, it’s a good thing he has no close relatives except me. What a catastrophe! How am I going to explain the loss of three helicopters worth millions?”

Marzak clamped his hand on Mohamed’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll simply have to ask the U.S. for an increase in its military aid package.”

The comment brought a thoughtful expression to Mohamed’s face. “A good idea. In the meantime, there are other more pressing matters to resolve.”

He told Marzak that he had arranged a ride and hotel room for him. They would meet after a short rest to decide what to do next.

From the airport, Mohamed drove to a walled house in the affluent neighborhood where his commander lived. The commander was a big man with a square jaw and shoulders that filled out the tuxedo he was wearing for a party at his house. He took Mohamed into his study and interrogated him about the mission.

“I’m sorry for your cousin, but we have to keep in mind the big picture. The control of the mineral rights under Amir’s land must be placed in the right hands. Everything else is a mere bump in the road toward that goal.”

“These bumps are the size of mountains, commander.”

“Then we will climb them one by one. The expedition was not a complete failure. Amir knows that he can be attacked at any time and in the future might not be so lucky. Pressure will be put on him using contacts in Kabul. He will be offered a piece of the action.”

“He’s a stubborn man, but it is worth a try.”

“Next, this treasure business. We must keep the Shadows as potential allies, but make sure they can’t cause trouble.”

“A delicate balance,” Mohamed grumbled.

“The Shadows won’t carry out the necklace plot until they have the treasure. But if they think the treasure is out of their reach, they may proceed anyways.”

“Then let’s persuade them that the treasure is still within reach.”

“How can we do that? The Americans most likely have it.”

“We don’t know that for a fact and I doubt the Americans will soon announce that the treasure is in their hands. As long as there is an unknown, we can use the treasure as bait. We need time to derail the Necklace plot and lure the Shadows out into the open.”

“They might believe us. For a little while.”

“In the meantime, we must get rid of Marzak. He’s the only one who can connect the strands of the Prophet’s Necklace. He must disappear without a trace. Leave that up to me.”

The commander took Mohamed by the elbow and moved him toward an exit. “I have to get back to my guests. Call me in the morning.”

Later, at his own house, Mohamed crawled into bed, but only slept a few hours before he was awakened by a phone call. It was the commander.

“There’s been an important development concerning Marzak,” he said.

“He’s been arrested?”

“Not exactly. A squad went to the hotel. Apparently, he never checked into the room.”

“What? He’s gone.”

“Correct. Our friend Mr. Marzak seems to have pulled his own disappearing act.”

Sutherland was on the move most of the day after leaving Route 66, scudding along under a cloudless sky to Durango, following Route 550 north through the San Juan national forest to Silverton where she stopped for a burger and Diet Coke before setting off again.

She caught her first glimpse of Ouray, Colorado after an exhilarating ride along a snaking stretch of mountain road known as the Million Dollar Highway. The city of Ouray calls itself the Switzerland of America, and the description works on some levels. Ouray is more than seven thousand feet above sea level, nestled in a narrow valley hemmed in on three sides by the thirteen-thousand-foot-high peaks of the San Juan mountain range, and laced with canyons, waterfalls and rushing rivers. The Victorian buildings that line the main street have a charm rivaling the quaint villages that occupy alpine valleys.

But the place lacks the green pasture gentility of its Swiss counterparts. The countryside around Ouray was shaped by volcanoes and glaciers, and later by rugged people who tore the riches from its rocky soil, leaving the evidence of their work in abandoned mines and the ruins of once-rich ghost towns.

Sutherland passed through Uncompahgre Gorge and followed a series of switchbacks to the city’s main thoroughfare. She found a comfortable B and B on a side street and washed the road dust off her face. Taking her computer bag, she got on her Harley and rode to the tourist information booth next to Ouray’s big hot springs pool.

She got a map showing all the abandoned mines in the area from the woman behind the desk, then she rode back to the B and B and sat on her bed with her computer. She called up the U.S. Geological Survey map of Ouray and surrounding countryside.

The Kurtz property was located off the Alpine Loop scenic byway, a sixty-five-mile-long road that winds through the northern San Juan range in the heart of mining country. Using the USGS chart for guidance, she called up satellite photos of the territory around the Kurtz mines and was able to zoom in on a section of woods at the base of a mountain. Some buildings were visible through the thick foliage.

She reread the file she had compiled on the Kurtzes. The first Kurtz mine was started in 1880 on former Ute Indian land at an elevation of 9800 feet. It closed in 1922, the same year Hiram Kurtz set off for Afghanistan, but during its decades of operation, produced nearly twenty million dollars in gold and silver, mainly, along with copper, lead and zinc as well. The peak population was nearly a thousand, and the mining town included stores, saloons, brothels and even a brick mansion for Kurtz. It was abandoned after the mines played out.

She found the old mining town using Google Earth and saw a few dirt roads and several buildings in the satellite picture. Most of the site was hidden by tree foliage. On the way out of town she stopped at a sporting goods store and bought a paper version of the survey map which she tucked into her computer bag, and a few minutes later she was back on Route 550 heading south.

She left the main road at Animas Forks and headed east, riding around twenty minutes before she turned off onto a gravel road and traveled around fifteen miles without seeing another person or vehicle. She was riding at a fast clip and almost missed a side road that after a hundred feet or so led to a double metal gate around ten feet high.

On either side of the gate was a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. The insulators spaced along the fence indicated that it was electrified. A second fence several feet inside the first had no insulators, but sprouted antennae that could broadcast the presence of an intruder. She saw no cameras, but that didn’t mean they weren’t cleverly disguised to blend into the thick pine woods.

As she got off her bike and approached the gate, she heard a soft rustling patter and two Doberman Pincers as big as ponies galloped along the road on the other side of the gate. They stood up with their front paws against the second fence, and their black eyes stared at Sutherland as if she were a doggie chew.

“Nice puppies,” she said in a high voice.

She backed away and walked the bike another hundred yards along the road. The dogs must have been trained to stay silent because as they paced her they didn’t even growl. She had seen enough. There was no way she could penetrate security without getting electrocuted, sliced by razor wire or torn to pieces by guard dogs.

She turned around and headed out of the forest. She analyzed the problem on the ride back to Ouray. When she pulled up in front of her B and B, she knew what she had to do. She went to her room and stared at her pudgy cheeks and round glasses in the mirror. Wussy. Not much she could do to change her appearance, but as a student of human nature, she knew that personality is projected from the inside out.

She opened a can of diet soda, popped her laptop and began to read the Kurtz website. She allowed herself to soak up the venomous outpouring that emanated from the screen. The paranoia was the easiest for her to absorb. There were some advantages to being delusional, she reflected. She clicked the link labeled Contact Us. She took a deep breath, stifled her disgust and started typing.

She said she was a former soldier and inserted snippets of the truth as bait. Her birth in the poor coal mining state of West Virginia. Her decision to join the army. Her service in Iraq. Her distrust of the government. She said she was traveling through Colorado, had looked up organizations that shared her philosophy, learned about the Ouray camp, and asked permission to visit.

She reread what she had written and hit the SEND command.

Nothing to do but wait for Kurtz to check out her background. She was sure he had his sources. She went out for pizza and while she was finishing her last piece she checked her computer.

The email had been sent by Colonel Hak Kurtz.

She had set the hook, very much aware that a five-hundred-pound great white shark might be hanging on the line. She’d have to make up the rest of her plan after she got on the other side the fence.

She replied to the invitation.

She checked her email and saw the message from Hawkins. She breathed a sigh of relief knowing that he was on his way home and that no one had been hurt, but she simmered over a feeling that she had been abandoned. He let her wait; she would let him wait. She imagined herself presenting himself with the emerald scepter and a shower of gold and gems.

She sent a summary of her plan to Hawkins, but clicked off before he had the chance to reply. Then she went to bed. Tomorrow was going to be a long day.

The 747 was flying at thirty-six-thousand feet and racing west across the skies at nearly six-hundred-miles an hour, but to Hawkins, who was worried about Marzak, the jet seemed to plod toward North America at a snail’s pace. He decided to call a war council.

“First of all, I want to thank everyone for going above and beyond during this mission,” he said. “But our job isn’t finished. As we discussed, we’ve got to find the treasure before Marzak does. It’s the only way to stop the Prophet’s Necklace. And it might give us the chance to take out Marzak once and for all, something I know we all could go for.”

Calvin made a face. “True. Only one problem, Hawk. We don’t know where the treasure is.”

“Marzak doesn’t know that. We’ll make him think we found the treasure. Or at least give the impression that we know where it is. The chance to get the treasure and me will be irresistible. He’ll come to us. And he’ll make mistakes.”

“You know what happens when a catfish gets a hold of bait,” Calvin said.

Hawkins was well aware of the danger his plan presented. “I don’t know of any other way.”

“How do you plan to get word to Marzak?” Abby said.

“Through the Newport Group.”

“You’re not serious,” Abby said. “Those are the people who hired you.”

“I’m well past the naïve stage,” Hawkins said. “It was obviously a set-up. Sutherland’s research confirms that Captain McCormick was tied in with Trask and Murphy. I asked Murphy to pass along a proposition to trade the treasure for Trask and McCormick. Not sure how far it will go.”

“That’s a long way from connecting them to a thug like Marzak.”

“You would think so, wouldn’t you?” Hawkins said with a wry smile on his face. “It was no accident that the Marzaks arrived at my house with guns blazing.”

“McCormick?” Abby said.

“Seems like a good guess for now. I’ll withhold judgment on the rest of the group.”

Calvin was already thinking operationally. “What’s your plan, once we get Marzak on the hook?”

“I’ll leave that up to you and Abby. First, I’ll see if I can even get the ball rolling.”

Hawkins strolled to the back of the cabin with the satellite phone in hand.

Years seemed to have passed since he had been called to the navy War College. He remembered his go-around with McCormick and was glad that his instincts had been on the mark. Not knowing how deeply the Newport Group had been compromised, he would have to tread carefully.

He punched out Fletcher’s number. The dry, patrician voice answered almost immediately.

“Hello, Lieutenant Hawkins. Nice of you to call from wherever you are.”

“I’m on my way home, Dr. Fletcher.”

There was a pause and Hawkins could almost hear the sound of Fletcher hiking up his bushy eyebrows.

“Then the mission was a success, I take it.”

“Yes and no. We dove into the lake, but the treasure was no longer there. All we found was a coin.”

“What sort of coin?”

“Gold. Inscribed with the name Prester John.”

Another pause.

“Do you have any idea where the treasure is now?”

“We’ve got a strong lead. We’ll know more when Dr. Everson has the coin verified.”

“Dr. Everson? I don’t understand.”

“She’s with us. She was in Afghanistan doing further research on Prester John and was able to help us with our explorations. She even intervened with the local drug lord.”

There was a dry chuckle on the other end of the line. “You certainly never lack for surprises, Lieutenant.”

“Speaking of surprises, we had problems with a dive team that tried to horn in on our operation.”

“Do you know who they were?”

“My guess is that they were mercenaries. They were led by a guy named Marzak. Luckily, we drove them off without any injuries to our team. Marzak escaped.”

“Too bad, but the good news is that you are all safe! Your country owes you a great debt.”

“That’s nice to hear, because I believe there is a payment coming my way.”

“Your honorable discharge is all taken care of. I’ll have the un-redacted report on what happened to you five years ago in Afghanistan. Send me a tally of other expenses. When will you arrive home?”

“We’ll be in Washington in a few hours. I’m disbanding my team and heading back to Woods Hole.”

“A wise decision. And Dr. Everson?”

“She will try to verify the coin and continue her research into Prester John. If you’ll excuse me, Dr. Fletcher, I’m on the run. I’ll send you a detailed report.”

“Yes, please do. Sooner than later. I’m anxious to hear about it. And I’d like to have you up to my home in Newport within the next few days so we can toast your success. Please call when you get back.”

“I will,” Hawkins said, clicking off. He went to his computer and scrolled through his message board. Only one new message awaited him. It was a follow-up on Sutherland’s warning about Murphy and Trask, and had been sent several hours earlier. He read her plan and the theory she developed on the treasure and her intention to visit the militia camp.

He tried to call her, and when there was no answer, sent her a quick text message. No answer. He cursed softly and walked to the other end of the cabin.

Minutes later, Hawkins had gathered everyone around a table at the forward end of the cabin. He said:

“There’s been a change in plans. While we trekked through the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan, Molly Sutherland, the fourth member of our team, has been working on a theory that the treasure may have been moved to the Kurtz mines in Colorado.” He opened his computer and read Molly’s report.

When he was finished, Abby said, “Given what we know about Kurtz, and the fact that the treasure is no longer in the tomb, I’d say Sutherland has a pretty sound theory.”

“Yes, but she’s going to need help,” Hawkins said.

“And I suppose you’re going to need fast transportation to Colorado,” Abby said.

“I think Sutherland is getting in over her head with this militia thing.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. I can arrange for a Gulfstream to be waiting at the airport when we arrive,” Abby said.

“Thanks, Abby. Let’s look at the satellite pictures Sutherland sent of the camp.” He set the computer in the middle of the table. “There’s a main road — the one Sutherland described in her report — and a number of off-road trails that snake around behind it and up the mountain. There’s a road going to the top of mountain as well.”

Calvin said, “That looks like a cleared boundary line surrounding the camp. Probably where they cut the woods back for the fence.”

Another aerial photo showed several buildings in a row near a large structure.

“Those must be old mining buildings and the Kurtz mansion,” Hawkins said. “Pretty far off the beaten path. From what Sutherland said about these guys, they’re expecting black helicopters to drop in any day. Anyone got any ideas on how to gain entrance without getting shot?”

Abby said, “Could you go back to the aerial with the topographical overlay?”

Hawkins clicked the mouse and the screen showed the camp and surrounding terrain with contour squiggles and elevation numbers.

She studied the screen. “I think I know a way.” Abby described what she had in mind. “I know it’s not the perfect plan, but it could work.” She paused. “Then again it might not.”

Calvin laughed at the disclaimer. “The possibility of a monumental failure is SOP for us special ops guys,” Calvin said. “You should have joined the SEALs, Abby.”

“I didn’t like that yucky green stuff you had to smear on your face,” she said. “Well?”

Hawkins stared at the screen, mentally working out each step of the plan.

“A thousand things could go wrong, and back in the day I would have tossed a plan like this into the shredder. Only one detail makes it worth the risk.”

“What’s that?” Abby said.

“Sutherland.”

Exactly one minute before the appointed time Sutherland rode up to the gate of the Kurtz camp. She was glad to see that the Dobermans were not there to greet her.

At the stroke of eleven, her ears picked up the sound of an engine. A khaki-colored World War II Jeep with two men in it drove up to the other side of the gate. Both men were dressed in camouflage. Aviator sunglasses shaded their eyes. The driver wore a wide-brimmed fatigue hat and the other man had a do-rag tied around his head Rambo style.

The Rambo impersonator got out of the car. He had a thick muscular body and his black hair was cut close to the shiny white scalp. A droopy mustache emphasized the downward tips of his unsmiling mouth. Sutherland’s eye went to the pistol holster and hunting knife at his waist.

Rambo pressed the button on a remote control. The gates swung open and he gestured for her to come inside. When she had ridden in, he closed the gates behind her and said: “Follow the vehicle.”

As she trailed the Jeep, she couldn’t help thinking how her poker-playing father used to say, “In for a dime, in for a dollar,” an adage meaning that if a hand was worth a little bet it was worth a big bet.

The road sloped gradually through thick piney woods. About a mile from the gate the forest ended and the road ran between a dozen or so one-story wooden buildings that looked like worker housing. They sported a fresh coat of white paint and seemed in generally good condition.

The Jeep kept on going past the buildings and stopped at a guard house manned by two armed men in camouflage. The driver jerked his thumb at Sutherland and the guards waved them through. The driveway went through a patch of dark pine woods and led to a two-story brick Victorian mansion with a black mansard turret and roof. The lawn that surrounded the mansion was overgrown with weeds.

The Jeep stopped and Rambo got out. “Go around back. General’s waiting for you.”

Sutherland slid off the Harley and went to use the kick-stand, but Rambo grabbed the handlebars.

“Hey, what are you doing?” she said.

“Just putting your pretty bike away for safe keeping. General’s in his shooting range. Follow the gunshots and you’ll find him.”

Her eyes smoldered with anger as she watched Rambo wheel the bike toward a five-port brick garage next to the mansion. Then she shouldered her pack and walked toward the pop-pop-pop sound coming from behind the mansion. She rounded one end of the house and saw a line of targets set up in a field.

A man wearing a fatigue hat and a matching desert camouflage uniform was firing a rifle at the targets which depicted a mean-faced man holding a pistol. The letters ATF printed in big letters across the chest identified the target as an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent.

The shooter had the M-16 rifle on automatic, firing methodically in bursts of three. As soon as he shredded one target, he moved on to the next and repeated the process.

Sutherland waited patiently. The man stopped before shooting at the last target, and turned around as if he knew she had been standing there all the time. He lowered the rifle and gestured for her to come over. He took off his safety goggles and ear protectors, handed them to Sutherland along with the rifle then pointed to the last target.

Sutherland hadn’t fired a gun in years, but her army training asserted itself. She slipped on the ear protection and goggles, put her arm through the sling and felt the rifle stock snug naturally against her shoulder. She clicked the safety off, squinted through the telescopic sight, curled her finger around the trigger, ripped off three shots and clicked the safety on.

The man pushed a button and the target moved toward the firing station along a track. He thrust his forefinger through one of the tightly clustered holes in the target’s forehead.

“You didn’t go for the easier heart shot.” He had a low, gritty voice.

“I like a challenge, sir.”

“You learn that in Iraq, Corporal Sutherland?”

“I learned a lot of things in Iraq, sir.” She smiled. “The first thing I learned was never to give up control of my weapon.”

Kurtz gave Sutherland a sly smile. He took the rifle back and with the other hand he patted the holster at his belt.

“Had my eye on you every second, corporal.” He made sure the weapon was unloaded and broke the action. “C’mon up to the house and have something cold to drink.”

Kurtz walked with a John Wayne swagger as if he’d just gotten off a horse. He led the way toward a raised veranda that took up around a third of the back side of the mansion. He directed Sutherland to a white painted cast-iron table and chairs and went through the French doors into the house, returning a minute later with two cans of pre-sweetened iced tea. He gave a can to Sutherland, popped the other and plunked in the chair across the table from her.

He removed his hat to reveal steely gray hair in a flat top military cut. “Hope you weren’t expecting anything stronger. I don’t allow alcohol here at the encampment.” He smiled, raised the can in the air. “Skaol.”

Kurtz took a sip that was almost dainty for a man who seemed to emanate a boot-camp macho masculinity. Then he knocked down the contents of the can, set it on the table and stared at Sutherland with deep-set amber colored wolf eyes under a straight brow.

Rather than challenge his piercing gaze, Sutherland glanced around as if she had been intimidated.

“I didn’t expect to find a place like this way out here in the woods.”

“Quite the little shack isn’t it?”

“I grew up in a coal mining town. This is like a palace to me, sir.”

He twitched his lips in a quick tight smile.

“Call me General Hak. I’m named after my grandfather Hiram who built this place and lived here while he developed the mines. It’s fine for my purposes, but it could use a little work.”

The place could use a lot more work, Sutherland thought. Bricks were missing, concrete trim was cracked and the panes in one of the tall windows had been replaced with plywood. The chairs they sat in were rusted where the paint had flaked off.

She simply nodded in agreement.

“I was surprised to get your email,” he said. “We get a lot of queries, but not too many drop-ins.”

“Like I said, sir — I mean General Hak — I was riding through the mountains. Not even sure where I’d land next.”

“We did a background search to make sure you were really in the army like you said. You checked out okay.” He sat back and laced his fingers behind his head. “What’re you running from, corporal?”

“What makes you think I’m running from something?”

“Hell, everyone’s running from something.”

“Guess you’re right, General Hak. I joined the army to get away from West Virginia. When the army let me down, I ran away from everything.”

“How’d the army let you down?”

She told him about going to Iraq, her enthusiasm for army life, and how her career hopes were dashed when she was attacked and the army not only didn’t protect her, but punished her with a discharge. She didn’t have to fake the emotion in her voice when she related how she had retreated to the desert isolation of southern Arizona, and how she went aimlessly on the road after her house caught fire and burned down.

The general’s features hardened. “Every one of those bums who dishonored you would have been shot under my command.” He sat forward in his chair. “Sorry to hear about your house. Probably some damned illegal Mexican torched it.”

That set him off, and for the next half hour Sutherland sat at the table and tried to feign a tacit approval as Kurtz displayed his warped version of reality. He weighed in against the objects of his ire one after the other. He talked about restoring the honor of the Kurtz name and fortune, which must have been a veiled reference to the failures of his playboy father. She heard echoes of her own paranoia in his ramblings, when she had raged against imagined forces that were out to get her. She almost felt sorry for the pathetic old man, but she reminded herself that he was unpredictable and dangerous. He reaffirmed this when he slammed his fist down on the table so hard it made Sutherland jump.

“The only thing that’s going to stop this great country from going down the drain is the militias. Are you ready to join us and make sure that doesn’t happen?”

Sutherland could only nod.

Kurtz’s manner changed completely. His thin lips widened in a broad smile.

He brought his hand to his chest. “I’ve got a bum ticker. Doctor says I could go any second. One foot in the grave the other on a banana peel. We need soldiers like you to carry on the cause when I’m gone. The militia movement’s had some hard times, and it’s up to folks like us to rejuvenate it. The government’s been cracking down, trumping up fake charges to get us in trouble with the law. We’ve been trying to bring the militias together, but all this takes money. You got any money, corporal?”

“A little, General Hak.”

He gave her an avuncular wink. “Just jerking your chain, corporal. What you’ve got is even more valuable. You’ve got military training and enthusiasm for the cause. You got the stomach for an intervention to help victims of the government?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Good enough. In the meantime we’re keeping a low visibility.” He furrowed his brow. “One other thing I’ve got to ask. You’re not a reporter, are you?”

“No, sir! I’ll take a polygraph test if necessary.”

“We caught you on camera yesterday. Why were you snooping around our gate?”

“I’m a trained soldier, General Hak. I was doing recon.”

He burst into laughter, stood up and extended his hand.

“That’s the kind of fighting spirit we need. You can stay here as long as you want. We’ll try you out. You’ll take our pledge. Most of the people are in the militia part-time, but we’ve got a small full-time cadre here at the base. You met a couple coming in. They’ll give you a tour of the camp, get you outfitted, go through some physical tests to see where you fit in. Mess is at sunset and it’s early to bed.”

She shook his hand.

“Thank you, sir. I was wondering about my motorcycle.”

“You’re free to leave any time, but we can’t have people constantly going in and out of the compound. Besides, it’s dangerous with the high voltage fence and the sentry dogs.”

He snapped off a salute. She did the same, but by then he had already turned and was striding back to the French doors.

As she stared at his back, she again remembered her father’s advice.

In for a dime, in for a dollar.

She tried to ignore the fact that Pop had lost his shirt at cards.

Rambo led the way to the quartermaster where she picked up a couple of uniforms then to the barracks to drop off her bag and change. The man’s camouflage uniform was too big, but she cinched the belt tight round her waist and rolled up the sleeves and pants. They rejoined Kurtz who proudly showed off the refurbished barracks, mess hall and the auditorium where he gave his pep-talks. Sutherland nodded like a bobble head doll, but she was more interested in the surrounding territory.

The camp was on several acres of rolling land at the base of a mountain. It was surrounded by forest that covered the lower slope of the mountain, rising to the bottom of a sheer rock face that soared up to the summit. Kurtz saw her looking at the road into the woods and said it led to the old copper mines scattered around the slopes of the mountain.

He ended the tour and dropped her off at the obstacle course which is where she met her trainer. The athletic woman was in uniform and her short blond hair was tucked under a drill sergeant cap.

“I’m Sergeant Paine, corporal, and my name is what I am,” she said in introduction. She gave Sutherland a once-over, shook her head, and said: “Let’s see what you are made of.”

She started off with push-ups, prisoner squats, jumping jacks and planks, then Sutherland ran through the obstacle course. After she crossed the finish line, doubled over from exhaustion, Paine escorted her back to the women’s barracks, told her to shower and report to the mess hall. After dinner there was a training film in the auditorium. Then it was bed time. Sutherland drifted off the moment her head hit the pillow.

A sharp-edged blast of a bugle playing reveille roused Sutherland from a sound sleep. She sat up in her cot and stared bleary-eyed out the barracks window, wondering what fool would be tooting a horn in the middle of the night. Then a woman’s voice barked over the loudspeaker:

“Rise and shine, grunts!” Sergeant Paine said. “Time to stretch!”

The strains of the Washington Post March blared over the PA system. Sutherland put her head under the pillow which failed to muffle the rousing beat of the John Philip Sousa composition.

She sat up again and glared at the wall speaker as if she could melt it with her eyes.

There was a pounding on the door and Paine shouted, “Five minutes, Corporal Sutherland.”

She pushed away the blanket and got to her feet. She was only wearing her underwear and the crisp air in the unheated barracks raised goose-bumps on her pale white skin. She got into uniform and pulled on her boots, jacket and floppy hat. Her basic training in the real army kicked into gear and she made up the cot to military standards without even thinking. Someone knocked once and the door swung open. Two people strode in. The man she called Rambo and Sergeant Paine who shouted, “Atten-shun!”

Sutherland stiffened her back, tucked her plump chin in and stared straight ahead, arms tight to her side.

The sergeant circled Sutherland, hands behind her back.

“Not bad for a newbie,” she said. “At ease.”

Sutherland relaxed, but kept her eyes fixed straight ahead.

“You’ve already met Captain Krause.” She put her face close to Sutherland’s. “We will be your teachers and your tormentors. When you leave here, you will have been transformed from your current sorry state into a hard-assed sonvofabitch who eats nails for breakfast.”

“Yes, sir!” Sutherland said. “Ma’am.”

“Good.” The woman’s voice lost its edge. “The men in this camp think women are soft. Do you think women are soft?”

“No, ma’am.”

Paine glanced at her comrade and grinned. “We will prove them wrong. Now get your ass outside for calisthenics. Hup.”

Sutherland marched out the door of the women’s barracks, swinging her arms like a wind-up soldier, and stepped out into the cold mountain air to join the half-dozen other recruits. Krause stood in the background watching the sergeant put them through their exercises with no change in his pit bull expression. Sutherland started gasping for air after a few sets of jumping jacks. Paine cut the session short, told the recruits they were pathetic, and said they had fifteen minutes to wash up and head toward the mess hall.

Sutherland went back into the barracks and splashed cold water onto her face. She booted up her computer. Kurtz had emailed her so there must be a wireless signal. She found the link, easily figured out the entry code, which was HAK, then she logged off and put the pack holding her computer under the cot. She would feel naked without her computer, but couldn’t risk damaging it. She slipped her phone under the mattress and smoothed down the blanket.

Halfway through breakfast — Froot Loops and skimmed milk — the sergeant burst into the mess hall and ordered everyone outside. The sky was graying with a pre-dawn light. She told them to line up according to height. As the only female, Sutherland was the shortest. Paine marched the motley column past the other barracks to a road leading into the woods.

“Normally we start the day with a five-mile run, but this crew is clearly incapable of anything more strenuous than feeding your face, so we will make it a brisk three-mile walk.”

Boot camp had begun.

On the road, Sutherland saw other groups, more tightly disciplined, as they trotted past with full pack and weapons. She broke the people in the camp into two groups. Some were citizens trying to look tough. Others had the easy swagger that comes with real experience as a soldier.

After the hike, they were given fake wooden rifles and put through bayonet practice. There was a short break for a lunch of protein bars and water. Next were martial arts and finally, the shooting range.

Many of the other recruits were hunters, and reasonably good shots, but they were tired from their exertion and barely able to lift their rifles. The sergeant’s scorn faded when she saw the tightly grouped holes Sutherland put in the target.

“Well, we got a real Annie Oakley here.” She clapped her hands. “Back to your barracks to clean up. Then supper and political orientation conducted by General Hak.”

She patted Sutherland on the back and told her she had made the men look like girl scouts.

On the way to the barracks, Sutherland glanced up at the mountain, recalling from her research that it was honey-combed with mines. She wondered whether it would be possible to sneak off on an exploration. She could pretend she got lost. But as she trudged back to the barracks, she saw that she had more pressing matters to worry about.

General Hak barred the door to the barracks. Standing slightly behind him, rifle resting in the crook of his arm, was Krause. The general was holding her phone.

He growled, “What the hell are you doing with this thing?”

“You never said anything about phones.”

“That’s because most of them don’t work out here. This one does.”

“A lot of places don’t have phone service, General Hak. I was a woman, traveling alone. It would have been dumb not to have communication.”

He gazed thoughtfully at the phone. “Yeah, I guess, so. But we’re confiscating this. For as long as you’re here, there is to be no communication with the outside world.”

She snapped off a salute that provoked a slight smile.

The other man who had met Sutherland in the Jeep came out of the barracks. “General. Could you come inside, sir? There’s something you should see.”

As she was marched through the door, Sutherland saw her laptop on the cot. The man picked the computer up and handed it to the general, who gazed at the screen then turned it to face her.

Before leaving the B and B, she had backed up all her files on a remote data storage center then eliminated them. She expected to see a blank screen except for a few icons, but someone had written her an email.

The general read the message, handed the laptop off to Krause and bore into Sutherland with narrowed eyes.

“Girl,” he said in a menacing tone. “You are in deep, deep trouble.”

When the Global Logistics plane landed at Dulles, waiting for it was an executive jet Abby had arranged with full crew and handlers who quickly transferred gear from the big plane to the Gulfstream G150. Abby had also arranged for a taxi to take Cait to her condominium, as it had been decided that she would stay and see what she could find out about the coin while the others continued on to Colorado. Within minutes, the sleek Gulfstream leapt into the air like a fighter plane on alert and headed west.

Cait watched the plane disappear from sight, then got into the taxi and gave the driver directions to her condo. She stepped into the living room and dropped her duffle bag on the floor. As she stood there breathing in the stale air, surrounded by familiar furniture and out of date magazines and newspapers, her adventures in Afghanistan seemed like a dream.

The dashing Hawkins was like a hero from one of the bodice-ripper romances she had read as a girl, ready to swoop in and save the fair maiden from the clutches of the nasty villain. Calvin looked as if he could walk through a brick wall unscathed. She had grown to like Abby, and sensed that she still had a lot of affection for her ex-husband, although there seemed to be a barrier between them. If Abby didn’t want Hawkins when they returned from their trip out west, Cait would be willing to step in.

Holding the Prester John coin in her hand to reassure herself that her adventures had not been in her mind, she called Nelson Black, a coin expert acquaintance. Cait had drawn upon Black’s expertise when she was writing her Silk Road books, and his name came to mind the second she saw the Prester John coin. She had contacted him earlier from the 747 saying she had a highly unusual coin he might like to see. He tried to tease out the details, but she said he would have to wait until she arrived to examine it in person.

“Hello Nelson,” she said. “Cait. I’m home.”

“Please hurry. You’ve got me all excited with your mysterious phone call from high in the sky.”

Cait smiled. “On my way.”

Twenty minutes later, she arrived in National Harbor, Maryland, where Black lived. He had been impatiently awaiting her arrival and eagerly led the way to his coin vault. The spacious basement room contained the shallow drawer filing cabinets that held his collection and a wooden table he used to examine and sort coins.

“Well, what do we have, Dr. Everson?”

She handed him the Prester John coin in a plastic bag.

He slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, extracted the coin, and held it by its edges, examining both sides. Then he placed it under the magnifier, squinted through the ten-power lens for a moment, flipped it over, took it off and weighed it, rolled it between his fingers, and turned to Cait.

“If I may ask, Dr. Everson, where did you find this coin?”

“In Afghanistan.”

He narrowed his gray eyes. “Specifically?”

“It was discovered in what was apparently a tomb in the central part of the country.”

“Was the tomb shown to you by a local? Sometimes natives will salt a ruin with fakes.”

“Its location was based on my research. The tomb seems to have been plundered, but the robbers dropped this coin.”

“As you said on the phone this is a very unusual specimen. Highly unusual I might say. Prester John was a controversial figure. Many scholars believe that he and his kingdom never existed.”

“I am in the minority that believes Prester John and his kingdom were real. I was hoping that your examination of the coin would prove it.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, but there are a number of possibilities.”

“I’d like to hear them.”

“This could be a coin from Prester John’s kingdom. Or this coin could have been minted by someone who peddled it to gullible buyers. Another possibility is that it is a fantasy item, which memorializes something that may not be real. Like a winged horse or a unicorn. Bottom line, I can’t confirm that this was currency minted in some long-lost kingdom.”

“I knew it was a long shot.”

“Don’t be disheartened. What I can do is tell you it is, in fact, an ancient coin, not a more recent fake.”

“Well, that’s something, at least.”

Black gave a crisp laugh.

“Further tests, like a spectroscopic analysis, may prove me wrong, but if I’m correct, and regardless of its origin, we are looking at one of the most important numismatic finds in the past hundred years.”

Black’s statement echoed in Cait’s ears as she drove back to Arlington. The coin tucked in her purse seemed to be emanating rays from the past. Even if the treasure were never found, the existence of the coin would bolster her Prester John theory and spur even further research.

Back at her apartment, she slipped out of her Indiana Jones outfit, showered, and crawled into bed. She fell asleep, thinking that she couldn’t wait to see the faces of her colleagues who had described her work as “pop research.”

She would have slept less soundly if she had known that Marzak was only a few miles away.

Marzak had a network of contacts around the world. After slipping out of the hotel in Islamabad, he had called a number and told the person at the other end that he had to get out of Pakistan as soon as possible. He was told to hang on and after an excruciating wait, he was instructed to go directly to the airport. A first-class seat was waiting on a commercial flight to London where he caught a British Airways plane to Washington.

Upon arriving, he had taken a taxi to an apartment building on the outskirts of the city. The unit ownership was under one of his many false names, and the big beehive of an apartment complex offered a degree of anonymity. The two-bedroom unit had served as a crash pad for him and his brother and a storage place for an array of weapons that would have supplied a small army.

He checked the security camera that kept watch on the apartment, but no intruders had been recorded. He laid some weapons on his brother’s bed and stretched out on the couch. He stared at the ceiling and fell into a watchful half sleep that ended when his eyes blinked open at the chirp of his cell phone.

The voice on the line belonged to one of the freelance operators he and his brother had employed for special jobs. “We picked up a signal from the transmitter we put in Dr. Everson’s car.”

“Let me know when she reaches a destination.”

The phone chirped again an hour later.

“She went to National Harbor, stayed around forty-five minutes and drove back to her apartment.”

“Where did she stop?”

“At a private residence. We checked. It’s owned by Nelson Black, a coin expert.”

Interesting.

“Put her under surveillance,” Marzak said. “Let me know if she has visitors or if she leaves again.”

He stretched out on the couch again to martial his physical and mental resources. His prime target was Hawkins, but he had learned long ago that low-hanging fruit was better than no fruit at all.

The military jail at Camp Kurtz was a dilapidated barn-sized shed that had been used as a mausoleum for dead mining equipment. The rough-hewn building was crowded with rust-covered, derelict machines, huge wheels, cylinders, riveted boilers and spring-like coils that looked more like industrial art than the mechanical guts of a busy mining operation.

Sutherland sat on the dirt floor of the shed, her right wrist handcuffed to a giant cable spool. She had been there for hours. Slivers of light sifting through gaps in the boards had provided the only illumination, but even those had disappeared and she was in near total darkness.

She was uncomfortable, thirsty and hungry. She would have killed for a bag of potato chips. Mostly, she was angry at herself for breaking her own rule against letting her computer out of her hands. She should never have left it in the barracks. She didn’t blame Hawkins for his ill-timed message. She had been hoping he would contact her, but he could never have dreamed that his words would be seen by hostile eyes. But there on the screen, for Kurtz to see, was Hawkins’ mangled attempt at texting shorthand:

A grating sound cut into her ruminations. The shed door swung open and a flashlight beam hit her face. She shut her eyes to block the light. Boots crunched on the dirt. A hand grabbed her by the wrist, unlocked the cuff and pulled her to her feet. Her arm was yanked behind her back and she was cuffed again.

“March,” Krause ordered.

He shoved her through the doorway. The Jeep was waiting to drive her to the mansion. They escorted Sutherland through the front entrance and down a long hallway. Wallpaper was peeling away and the corridor had a musty odor. Krause stopped in front of a door and knocked.

The general barked: “Enter!”

Krause opened the door, pushed Sutherland into the room and stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind her.

Kurtz sat behind an antique desk of gargantuan proportions that was carved with Gothic motifs. The top of the desk was bare except for a riding crop and an old-fashioned goose-neck lamp that provided the only light, but it was enough illumination for her to see that the suits of armor flanking the desk were rusty and missing parts.

“Sit,” the general said, pointing to a plain wooden chair.

Sutherland did as she was told. Kurtz opened a drawer and pulled out her computer, which was on. He placed it on the desk, screen facing him.

“Who’re you working for? ATF? DEA? FBI?”

“You forgot the BVD.”

“What’s that stand for?”

“My father wore BVD underwear. He said it stood for Buster V. Davenport.” She paused. “It was a joke. Coalminer humor.”

He tapped the computer with the riding crop.

“This,” he said, “Is no joke. It’s code. Tell me what it says.”

The message from Hawkins said: Alive and Smiling. Thanks for the information. Congratulations. Acknowledge Kurtz has Prester John treasure. Home tomorrow. Talk to you later.

“It’s not code, it’s texting shorthand. Any teenage kid could tell you what it says.”

“You tell me what it says.”

“It’s a message from a friend of mine. It says that he’s on his way home and will call tomorrow.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“An ex-navy guy. I know him from Iraq.”

Kurtz leaned forward and glowered.

“I might have believed you corporal, except for one thing.” He slowly spun the computer around so that the screen was facing her and tapped it with his riding crop. “That’s my family name in your friend’s message. How come?”

She had been thinking how to answer the inevitable question.

“I wrote my friend that I was coming here to the old mine.”

“What about the PJ dollar sign stuff?”

She had expected the question.

“Shorthand again. P means Poor. J means that I need a job so I can contribute to your cause.”

He sat back, folded his arms and stared at her for a second before the grin vanished.

“Know what I think it means, corporal? It means you are lying.”

Sutherland shrugged. “That’s too bad, because it also means that you feel you can no longer trust me. So I’d like my motorcycle back and an escort to the gate.”

“You’re not going anywhere until we check you out. And if we find you are a spy, you will be brought up before a court martial.”

“You have no jurisdiction over me. I’m a volunteer.”

“The second you passed through the gates of this camp, you came under my authority. My word is the law here.”

Sutherland’s eyes narrowed behind the round glasses. She had had enough of this jerk.

“If you don’t let me go, this camp will be history.”

“Hah! What’re talking about?”

“I’ve frozen all your financial assets.”

“Bull crap!”

“Bull crap yourself. Check your accounts if you don’t believe me.” She gave him the bank name and account number and the quantity of money. “It’s a pretty pitiful amount, but I took it out and I’m the only one who can put it back.”

He stood up, placed his palms on the desk and loomed over her like an avenging angel. “I. Have. Had. Enough. Of. This.” He smacked the riding crop down on the desk and yelled for Krause, who was outside the door and ordered him to take her back to the jail. Krause grabbed her roughly by the arm.

“Wait!” she protested. “If I’m under military arrest, I come under the army rules for treatment of prisoners. Treatment at all times should be humane. I’m hungry and thirsty and I don’t like that dark hole. If I don’t get better treatment, you and your men will be on food stamps when I get through with you.”

They stared at each other. Kurtz knew better than to underestimate an enemy, and he didn’t like the idea that Sutherland knew his bank and account information. And she was right about the military rules.

“Take the prisoner to the barracks. Give her food and water.”

Krause prodded her back to the Jeep. They rode to the women’s barracks and he handcuffed her to her bunk. He called someone on his hand radio. Paine showed up a few minutes later with some power bars and Gatorade, which she handed to Sutherland without saying a word or making eye contact.

Sutherland thought that maybe she shouldn’t have threatened Hak. The general was even more delusional than she was. He was obviously mentally ill and she should have handled him with kid gloves, but she didn’t do well with threats. She could only wish that he still had a shred of sanity and would release her once he checked on the status of his funds. She closed her eyes and dozed off.

Kurtz paced back and forth in his study, occasionally slapping his thigh with his riding crop.

The message on Sutherland’s computer had sparked a long-forgotten memory. He’d been a boy when his father told him about Grandpa Hiram going to Afghanistan to look for a fabulous treasure. When he had scoffed at the story, his father gave him a book to read.

He scanned the shelves and his hand reached out for a book entitled, “The Emerald Sceptre.” He sat behind his desk and leafed through the pages he had first read with youthful excitement.

He had dreamed of the Prester John treasure for weeks after reading the book. He wondered if his grandfather had actually found the treasure and what he did with it. His father had said that Hiram moved back to the mansion after he returned from Afghanistan and stayed there until he died. The family had wondered why he didn’t retire to the comforts of New York instead of his played-out mines, but figured Hiram’s mind had become addled from travel fever.

All of a sudden, the shorthand equation on the computer made sense.

Kurtz equals the Prester John treasure.

Maybe Sutherland wasn’t a spy. Maybe she was a treasure hunter and thought the Prester John treasure was on Kurtz’s property and had lied her way into the camp to get closer to it.

He sprang from his chair and went over to an oversized lift-top cabinet. Lifting the lid, he gathered up the yellowed sheets of paper stacked inside. Printed on the three-by-two foot sheets of paper were diagrams of the mines on the Kurtz property.

He spread them out on his desk and examined each diagram under a magnifying glass. Half-way through the pile he stopped and brought the goose-neck lamp down until it was inches from the paper.

His boyhood excitement came back as he saw, scrawled in pencil at the end of a mine shaft, a penciled circle drawn around two printed letters.

P and J.

The sight of the simple letters was like popping a cork in his brain. This was a gift from the gods! A treasure would give him the means to defeat the forces of darkness conspiring to humble his beloved nation. With advanced weapons he could foment revolution, destroy governments and shoot down squadrons of black helicopters. And he could return honor to the Kurtz name that had been stained by the antics of his drunken father.

A maniacal light glimmered in his eyes. At any given time, he thought he was the reincarnation of many long-dead military leaders. Patton. Napoleon. George Washington. Caesar. Alexander. But as his fevered brain imagined the future, it seemed that the blood of all the great leaders who came before him now ran through his veins.

He clicked on the hand radio that connected him with Krause.

“Make preparations to march as soon as it’s light,” he ordered.

“We’re we going?” Krause asked.

“On to glory, sergeant! On to bloody glory!”

After a smooth three-and-a-half hour flight at a speed of Mach.80 the Gulfstream G150 landed at Montrose regional airport. A gray Jeep Wrangler sat in the parking lot, keys in the ignition. Tied down on the roof rack were two long objects wrapped in fabric bags. Attached to the rack between the bags was a cargo box.

Hawkins got behind the steering wheel. Abby slid in next to him and started going over a checklist on her IPad. Calvin sat in back doing a weapons inventory. They headed south on Route 550, passing through the sleeping town of Ouray, and continuing on the Million Dollar Highway to the connection with the Alpine Loop. The Jeep followed the same route Sutherland had taken, but near the Kurtz property, they split off on a different route.

The road was narrow, winding, rutted and at times, non-existent, devolving into a root-bound track that ascended the mountain in a series of tight switchbacks that the Jeep had to edge around in fits and starts. As the Jeep moved higher, the tall pines thinned out, to be replaced by shorter trees, then shrubs, and finally, lichen-covered rocky slabs that were black with moisture. They entered an elevation where groping fingers of fog diffused the headlight beams and rendered them almost useless. Hawkins strained his eyes through the windshield, trying to follow an imaginary line up the middle of the road.

Abby’s voice broke his concentration.

“We’re here,” she said.

Hawkins braked to a stop, leaned on the wheel and stared at the swirling gray mists.

“We’re where?”

“On top of the mountain. Sun should be coming up in a few minutes. The operation is now officially yours. I got you here. The rest is up to you.”

They got out of the Jeep. The temperature was at least twenty degrees colder than at the base of the mountain. They shivered as they unloaded the heavy duty plastic storage box from the luggage rack. Calvin opened the box and handed out a CAR-15 with extra ammo clips, pistol, knife and other first line gear.

Hawkins checked his altimeter and compass. “We’re at ten thousand feet,” he said. “The point should be about a hundred feet in that direction.”

Calvin swept his flashlight at the soupy mists.

“What if it isn’t?”

“Simple. We fall off the mountain.”

“Good thing I know when you’re joking.” Pause. “You are joking?”

“Sure, Cal. I’m joking.”

They lugged the first bag fifty feet or so, set it down and went back for the other. Abby dropped light sticks to create a path through the fog. After a couple of trips back and forth the gear was stacked and ready to go.

A silvery glow came to the mists as the new sun reflected off thousands of droplets of moisture. They moved through the pre-dawn gloom like ghosts. As the fog thinned, the mountain top materialized and they could see that they were near the edge of the domed summit.

Hawkins and Calvin walked onto a ledge, which stuck out like a huge diving platform. The vertical wall of gray rock under the ledge dropped a few hundred feet to where the mountain flared out at a forty-five degree angle.

Valley fog was pooling in a wooly layer of dark gray clouds that obscured the base of the mountain. Hawkins extended his hand and felt the air current rising up the sheer face.

“Good air flow. Should give us a nice ridge lift.”

Abby’s plan to jump off the top of the mountain and fly down to the Kurtz camp on hang-gliders had seemed crazy when she proposed it. But it seemed slightly less insane after she showed off a 3-D image she had created on her IPad with a GPS link to Google Earth. Abby pointed to the ledge.

“Here’s your diving board. Mountain elevation is around two thousand feet. Follow the flight line I’ve charted to this clearing near the camp, and with the sun behind you, you should make it to the ground without being seen.”

“Not bad. What about extraction?” Calvin said.

“I’m still working that out.”

After Hawkins studied the maps and photos he said, “I’ve done enough hang-gliding to be comfortable with the flight. What about you, Cal?”

“I’ve tried it a few times. Can’t be any worse than fast-roping from a chopper onto the deck of a ship. Let’s do it.”

The answer didn’t surprise Hawkins. Calvin would jump into a volcano if Hawkins asked him to, and he’d do the same for his friend.

Returning to their stockpile, they unpacked the bags and assembled the gliders. The cargo box yielded camouflage one-piece jumpsuits, helmets with built-in radios that could be operated with a finger switch, and protective goggles. In addition to their weapons and ammunition, they each had a wristwatch that contained an altimeter and compass, and a helmet-mounted variometer that would track the climb and descent rate and warn the pilot with a beeping sound if the glider was in danger of stalling. Hawkins had a wrist GPS as well.

“Time, gentlemen,” Abby said with a glance at her watch.

“Ready?” Hawkins asked Calvin.

“Ready.”

Hawkins strapped himself into the harness, grabbed the sides of the control bar, and lifted the sixty-five pound glider over his head.

Calvin hoisted his glider, teetering as he tried to balance the assembly.

“Looking good, Cal,” Hawk lied.

“Let’s see if I got this right, Hawk. Push the bar down to go fast, pull it to slow down. Shift my weight to make a turn.”

“You’ve got it. The launch is easy. Just run down the slope, jump off, and when you feel surge from the wind in the sail, drop your hands from the sides of the bar down to the horizontal bar.”

“Like this?”

Calvin trotted down the ledge, keeping the wing level, and jumped off into space. The glider dipped, as the force of gravity pulled it down and forward, but the wing caught the air being deflected up the face of the mountain, and rose higher, delicately balancing on an updraft.

Calvin soared away from the mountain and over the fog-shrouded valley in a straight line. He tucked his legs into the cocoon-like bag that extended from the harness, straightened his body, rolled the wing to one side and then the other, and straightened out into a dive to gain speed, climbing in an aerobatic loop that had him flying upside down, then back again.

He lowered his left wingtip, a maneuver that brought him into a rolling turn back toward the ledge. Calvin’s voice crackled over Hawkins’ earphones.

“What’s wrong, hawk man? Forgotten how to fly?”

Hawkins pressed the radio switch. “You said you had only flown couple of times.”

“That’s right, man. Liked it so much I bought my own glider.”

“I didn’t know bald eagles grew so big,” Hawkins said, referring to his friend’s shaved scalp.

“Best you can do man? Flap your wings instead of your mouth and get up here in the sky with the big birds.”

Abby’s voice cut into their conversation.

“It’s getting light. If you two eagles don’t get to the ground in a couple of minutes you’ll be sitting ducks.”

“Lady’s got a point,” Calvin said.

“So she does.”

Hawk started off at a brisk walk that accelerated into a run. He leapt off the ledge and felt the surge as the sail caught the wind, arresting his downward motion. The glider lifted him higher and he headed out in a straight line, keeping his wing more or less level. It had been a while since the last time he had flown in a hang glider, and he reminded himself that his moves had to be gentle.

Within moments, he was soaring over the valley, kept aloft by the wave of air upwelling from the ground far below. Calvin had come around and was pacing him on the right side. Hawkins glanced at his wrist GPS, shifted his body weight to adjust his course, and as he neared the target, pulled back on the bar. The front of the wing tipped down, and he began to gain speed. Several times he got going too fast, or had to correct for current variability, so that the descent was more like that of a falling leaf than a bird.

Near the top of the cloud layer he looked as his altimeter. The ceiling was low, which would keep them invisible until the last few moments of flight, but the ground would come up fast.

He jerked his thumb downward, and Calvin gave him the OK sign.

Abby watched Hawkins’ torturous descent from the top of the mountain. She was wondering if she’d been overconfident in coming up with this crazy plan and breathed a sigh of relief as the pair of large birds slipped out of sight in the gray clouds. She lowered the binoculars and looked around at the shreds of fog that lingered on the bleak, rocky summit.

And all at once, she felt very much alone.

She took a last glance into the chasm, muttered a quick prayer to the gods that look over mortals who have more courage than good sense, and hurried back to the Jeep.

Marzak watched Cait get into her Honda and he started the engine of his rental car. He was parked across the street from her Alexandria apartment. His Washington Redskins baseball hat was pulled down low over his platinum hair and aviator sunglasses shielded his eyes.

He pulled out behind Cait, keeping back a couple of car-lengths. He followed her out to the Beltway, then toward Washington, expecting her to head for Georgetown, but she bypassed the city, and drove over the Bay Bridge, then south on the eastern shore of Maryland.

The change in expectations heightened his hunting instincts, especially as the countryside grew more rural and houses farther apart. She pulled over a couple of times, once into a gas station where she talked to someone in the office, then kept going.

He would pounce as soon as he sensed that the moment was right.

When Cait turned off the country road onto a narrow blacktop road that led into the woods, he knew that moment would come very soon.

Cait’s decision had been impulsive.

She had every intention of driving into Georgetown to begin her research, but she changed her mind at the last second. She had been thinking about the treasure, and its long voyage from Afghanistan and across the ocean, when she remembered the fate of the Kurtz yacht.

The boat had ended up as a restaurant on the Eastern Shore of Maryland according to Sutherland’s Prester John file. Cait thought the rediscovery of the yacht and its connection to the treasure would be another whole chapter in her book, and she felt herself irresistibly pulled to visit it.

She wandered the back roads, and was about to give up her search when the gas station attendant told her the restaurant had closed years before, but the boat was still there on the shore. She could hardly contain her excitement when she saw the faded old sign on the leaning post.

The Yachtsman Seafood Restaurant.

She ignored a No Trespassing sign and turned onto the road. Trees and bushes whipped both sides of her car and the wheels bumped over broken blacktop that looked like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

The rank smell of the bay became stronger as she drove deeper into the woods. She traveled another quarter mile, rounded a curve and saw the old yacht Kurtz had named after his dead wife. Barely visible on the stern were the words: Sweet Priscilla. Cait stared at the yacht, trying to reconcile the rotting old derelict in front of her with the sleek ocean-going vessel she had seen in the old photographs.

She got out of the car and walked toward the vessel, which had been drawn up onto land. She could see the sparkle of bay water beyond the marsh that bordered the shore. She walked past another restaurant sign, this one hanging by a single nail, and stopped at the bottom of a wooden ramp leading onto the deck. She tested the ramp with her foot to make sure it wouldn’t break under her weight, and walked up it.

Cait stopped in front of a gaping doorway. The doors lay in pieces on the deck. She stuck her head through the portal only to recoil at the over-powering smell of rot and mold. Her eyes could pick out interior details in the light coming through the windows and holes in the walls. She saw some old beer cans and assumed they had been tossed there by fishermen. There were broken tables and chairs, indicating that this once had been a dining room. Birds had built nests in the ceiling beams and decorated the floor with their droppings.

She was overcome by a sense of incredible sadness. Despite the nastiness of her surroundings she found herself being drawn further into the boat.

If only this old wreck could talk, what a story it would tell, she thought.

She walked through the dining room into a space that must have been a lounge.

Light streamed through the windows illuminating the old bar and overturned tables and stools. She tried to picture the bar filled with alcohol-fueled laughter and the clink of glasses, but the task was beyond her imagination. It was clear that this was a fool’s errand. The interior of the boat had been gutted of any trace of Kurtz or his treasure.

She turned and walked out of the lounge, engrossed in her thoughts.

As she stepped through the doorway into the dining room, her heart jumped at a glimpse of movement off to her right and the sound of a creaking board. Before she could react, she felt a quick stabbing pain hitting her shoulder.

Her scream caught in her throat as the intense searing pain surged through her body. Her legs turned to rubber, her knees buckled, and the floor came up to meet her. As she lay on the floor with her limbs twitching involuntarily, she had the vague sensation of something hard and cold pressed against her neck, then came a soft puffing sound and a black curtain fell over her eyes.

Kurtz was dressed like a gangly version of World War II tank commander General George Tecumseh Patton. Twin pearl-handled revolvers hung from his hips. Three white stars emblazoned his shiny black helmet. The short-waist Eisenhower jacket buttoned tightly across his narrow chest was festooned with a rainbow of military service ribbons. Tan riding pants drooped from his thin legs. The steel-shod heels of his leather knee-high boots clacked as he strode across the wooden floor. He whacked the side of Sutherland’s bunk with his riding crop.

“Time to move out, corporal.”

He gestured with his crop to Krause, who unlocked the handcuffs from the bunk. He pulled Sutherland to her feet and re-cuffed her hands in front of her, then prodded her toward the door with his rifle. The skin between her shoulder blades was tender from previous jabs and the gun’s muzzle hurt. She stopped and turned to Kurtz.

“General, please tell your soldier boy that if he pokes me one more time with his make-believe manhood, I will take his weapon and stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

Krause blinked at the low, menacing voice coming from the pudgy round face, and then he laughed and turned to Kurtz for reinforcement. The general chuckled and smacked his thigh with the riding crop:

“Do as the prisoner requests or she’ll hit you over the head with the Geneva Convention.”

Krause used his hand instead of his rifle to push Sutherland through the door and out into the gray darkness. The World War II army Jeep was parked outside the barracks with its motor running. A big Ford 250 pick-up with four militia men was parked behind the Jeep.

The general told Sutherland to get in the back seat. Sergeant Paine sat beside her. Kurtz climbed into the passenger seat and Krause got behind the wheel. Kurtz raised his riding crop in the air and pointed forward.

As they drove past the deserted barracks, Kurtz said airily, “You think I don’t know why you came here, corporal? Well I know all about my grandfather and Prester John. You came here to steal our property. Admit it.”

Sutherland answered with her name, rank and made up serial number.

“Military rules? I’m okay with that, but you might not be.”

Sutherland didn’t like his tone, which was smug and threatening, but she kept her mouth shut.

The two-vehicle convey drove past the mansion and through the ghost town. After about a mile the road began to climb through the woods, becoming steeper as it meandered back and forth in a series of ascending switchbacks. The road surface was dirt and gravel and studded with boulders, but the slow-moving vehicles made steady progress. After traveling nearly an hour, they emerged from the woods into an open area at the base of a high ridge.

The general studied a large rectangle of paper for a few minutes and told the driver to keep going another hundred yards.

“This is it,” he said. “Stop.”

The headlights picked out a crumbling shed and behind it, rails emerging from the side of the hill. The mine entrance itself was almost invisible, a rectangular shadow partially obscured by brush that had grown around the opening. Kurtz got out of the Jeep and walked up to the entrance. He flashed his light on, showing a wall of weathered gray boards, and then ordered his men to give him a hand.

At the general’s orders, a couple of his men used crow bars to remove the barrier. The boards easily pried away from the rusty nails holding them in place.

Kurtz consulted the mine diagram again.

“The main shaft goes straight in. There are four tunnels off to the right. We want the third one. Saddle up.”

He strode into the mine with Krause, then came Sutherland and Sergeant Paine, followed by the militiamen. The tunnel sloped down at a gradual angle. The blockade had protected the interior of the mine from moisture and destructive forest creatures and the timbers supporting the walls and ceiling were mostly intact.

They trudged in silence between the narrow tracks and encountered the first side tunnel about an eighth of a mile in. They kept moving, passed another opening after a few hundred yards, and after a slightly longer walk came to the third. A few yards beyond the opening, the main shaft ended in a blank wall.

“Something’s not right,” Kurtz growled.

He studied his diagram, and then wheeled about and with his entourage following, slowly retraced his steps, playing the beam of his flashlight on the walls. He stopped and studied a section of wall that seemed to be slightly indented. He borrowed a crowbar and pried away a slab of rock that was no thicker than a flagstone. Wood could be seen through the hole where the rock had been.

He stepped back and handed the crowbar to a militia man, who pried away more of the flat rocks. Behind the façade was a wooden plank blockade similar to the barrier at the mine entrance.

Kurtz led the way. The tunnel was smaller than the main passage, and went in for a couple of hundred feet before it ended in a wall of steel plates. Painted on the wall in red paint was a primitive drawing of a skull.

“What the hell is that?” Krause said.

“Indian hex sign,” Kurtz said. “Figures. They say Grand pop Hiram hired a bunch of Utes to keep an eye on the more valuable mines. They weren’t interested in gold or silver and could keep their mouths shut.” He stepped back. “That hoodoo won’t bite you. Take ‘er down.”

The men took turns working the crowbars through gaps in the plates. Once one section was pried off, the others came down easily. After about ten minutes a gap around three feet wide, reaching from ceiling to floor, was opened in the barrier.

As soon as the gap was opened Kurtz pushed through. There was silence, then something that sounded like a choking cry.

“You all right, general?” Krause said.

A mad cackle of laughter issued through the opening.

“I’m more than all right.”

The voice had a ghostly echo, as if it were coming from the inhabitant of a sepulcher. The militia men exchanged puzzled glances and nervously clutched their weapons.

Krause said, “You want us to come in, general?”

Kurtz answered simply. “No. I’m coming out.”

He squeezed through the opening, an object wrapped in shreds of cloth clutched close to his chest. He removed the cloth and cradled in his arms was a cross around three feet long that seemed to glow with a green and yellow fire.

The horizontal arms were shorter than the main shaft, and the entire surface was covered with swirling filigrees of gold. The beams from the flashlights reflected off the finely-cut facets of dozens of emeralds inlaid into the gold. At the top of the cross was an emerald as large as an egg.

Kurtz slowly raised the scepter high above his head like a medieval warrior clutching a broadsword. The militiamen stared at the object as if hypnotized by its unearthly glow.

Clearly visible where the arms crossed, inlaid in smaller diamonds, was the letter J.

Sutherland had been brought up in a religious family, but her army experiences had left her cynical and her world had become one of technology rather than superstition. But even she could feel the magical power that radiated from the scepter and seemed to flow down through Kurtz’s upraised arms and into his body. The light from the precious stones reflected in the general’s eyes, which burned with a supernatural glitter.

The subterranean surroundings with the shadowed walls, the vacant stares of the armed militiamen, and most of all, the cross in the hands of a fanatical madman, all seemed part of an unholy ceremony that mocked good and celebrated evil.

Sutherland’s literal mind could not comprehend the totality of what was going on. But she knew from the shivers dancing along her spine that she had every reason to be very afraid.

Hawkins swooped down and emerged below the wooly layer of clouds. He was going too fast so he brought the glider’s nose up, precipitating a string of beeps from the variometer warning him of a stall. He pushed the control bar forward and stabilized his flight. He was still having trouble keeping the wing level when Calvin dropped out of the clouds seconds later.

Hawkins pressed the finger switch on his radio. “How do I look?”

“Like a drunken condor. But you’re headed in the right direction. Down.”

Hawkins glanced at the forest below, then at the GPS screen. “Our LZ is directly ahead. Check out the lights at eleven o’clock.”

“I count two vehicles moving up the mountain,” Calvin said. “What do you want to do?”

Hawkins had to make a quick choice. They had targeted a clearing near the camp as a landing zone. But if Sutherland were with the vehicles advancing up the side of the mountain, it could take hours to climb to her.

“Scrub the original plan. We’ll land on the mountain.”

Hawkins scanned the slope for an opening in the trees.

“Off to the left,” Calvin said.

Hawkins saw a knob of gray rock that protruded from the forest in the shape of a human shoulder. The promontory was shrouded by misty threads and looked about the size of a dime. Hawkins hoped that it just seemed small from a distance.

“Good for a sparrow perch, maybe, but I’ll give it a try.”

“Just wheel around in a gradual curve, approach the target, ease out of the hammock, keep it slow, and push your bar up at the last second as you get your feet under you. Pieceofcake.”

Hawkins shifted his body weight to put the glider into a turn that pointed the front of the wing directly at the rock. He started moving too fast again, brought the nose up, and then down, making sure the wings were steady. It was a smooth save, and Hawkins began to feel more confident. His cockiness ended as he made the approach and saw the deep fissures in the promontory. Rather than being smooth and flat on top, the rock was lumpy and uneven.

It was too late to veer away.

He had already slipped his legs out of the cocoon, and had them under him, knees bent slightly. A few feet from the ledge he brought the wing up and slowed almost to a stop. His feet hit the hard ground. The shock on his bad leg was greater than he expected, and the impact, and the weight of the gear he was carrying, threw his center of gravity off.

He wobbled dangerously, but by using every ounce of strength in his arms and shoulders, he managed to keep his footing on the uneven surface and immobilize the wing.

He unsnapped the harness and lifted the wing over the side. The glider landed in the trees about a hundred feet below the knob. Then Calvin came in and landed lightly beside him, took a few steps in, and brought the wing down. Hawkins helped him out of the harness and they pushed the wing over the side to join the other hang-glider.

Hawkins and Calvin turned toward the mountain and pushed their way through the brush into the woods. They headed in the direction of the last headlight sighting. After trekking through a murky forest, they stepped out onto a road. Fresh tread marks could be seen in the dirt in the light from the rising sun.

They started hiking up the steep-angled road, but after ten minutes of walking, Hawkins put his hand up to signal a halt. As if on cue, a series of angry shouts shattered the morning stillness.

Then a gunshot echoed throughout the forest.

Hawkins and Calvin began to run.

Kurtz had ordered the militia men to tear down the rest of the wall and within minutes the Indian hex sign was a pile of splintered wood. Behind the barrier was a space about five feet deep. Black ebony chests of ancient design, each inlaid with gold swirls, were stacked in rows of four against the wall at the back of the space.

Kurtz went over to a chest that sat on top of the pile. It was longer in shape than the others and the lid was up, revealing faded purple and gold brocade.

“That’s where I found her,” he said. “Waiting for me.”

He moved the container off the pile and ordered Krause to open the next one. Krause undid a simple snap latch and lifted the cover.

“Nothing in here but a couple of old books, general.”

He reached in and handed Kurtz a volume bound in dark red leather, around eight by eight inches in size. Kurtz opened the book to the flyleaf. Written in black ink, the letters connecting in an elegant script, were the words:

Kurtz knew the name from his reading. Magister Philip was the physician the Pope sent to find Prester John. He opened the book, eager to examine its contents, but furrowed his brow in disappointment when he saw the tightly written and densely packed Latin script. He put the book back in the chest and lifted out the second volume. It was twice the size of the first, and seemed of more modern production. Kurtz read the gold words embossed on the cover:

He flipped the cover back and found a sheet of yellowed paper tucked into the book. Typed on the paper was a simple message:

It was signed: Hiram Kurtz.

The general held the paper up for his men to see. “This is a note to me from my granddaddy. He owned this mine. As his rightful heir, I claim everything in it. He has given this to me.”

Kurtz went over to the stack and with the scepter touched a chest lightly as if he were confirming knighthood.

Two militia men moved forward to carry out his unspoken command. The box was only around sixteen inches long and twelve inches wide and deep, but the militia men grunted with exertion as they lifted it from the stack and set it on the floor.

“Open it!”

A militia man undid the scrolled metal latch and pushed the cover back.

There was a collective intake of breath at the shimmering contents. The chest was filled to the rim with gold coins each the diameter of an old American silver dollar and twice as thick.

Kurtz leaned over, plucked a coin from the chest and held it close to his face to read the inscription Presbyter Johannes under the profile of the bearded man. He tossed the coin back into the pile and touched another box with the scepter.

The chest was set on the floor and opened. And once more there was a sharp intake of breath. The chest was full of uncut and cut diamonds. The sight launched Kurtz into a crazed frenzy. He touched box after box, and each was opened to reveal its singular contents.

Rubies. Lapis lazuli. Sapphires. Jade. Opal. Amber. Garnets. Pearls. And Emeralds.

The radiance burst from the opened chests, reflecting off the hard faces of the militia men who stared at the fabulous treasure as if in a trance. Sutherland was equally transfixed, but at the same time, she was wondering if she might be able to steal away while her captors were distracted. That hope was cut short when Kurtz shouted a command.

“This stuff won’t do any good lying here,” he said. “Move it.”

The sharp order broke the men out of their trances. They hefted the heavy chests out to the entrance of the side tunnel and placed them in an abandoned ore cart. The contents of an oil can that lay next to the cart were used to lubricate its wheels. With the militia men pushing and pulling, the treasure boxes were moved to the mine’s main entrance.

Kurtz came over to Sutherland, who was being watched by Krause.

“Well corporal, it looks like I won’t need that money you stole from our bank account. We’ll be able to buy all the guns and ammo we want. We can recruit trainers to turn my volunteers into a formidable force. We can buy bombs and explosives. Rockets that’ll bring down aircraft. We’ll be able to hit the government before they can hit us. We’ll have the biggest private army in the U.S. We’ll be able to take our country back. Thanks to you.”

Sutherland blinked away the spittle blasting her face.

“That’s nice. If you don’t need me, I’d like my motorcycle.”

“Not so fast, corporal. You’re the one who likes rules and regulations. In my book that means a court martial.”

Sutherland had had enough. “You can’t court martial me,” she shouted. “This is a fake army and you’re a fake general.”

He seemed to recoil at the comment and a flicker of sanity entered the mad eyes, but it passed quickly. He scowled and with his free hand he patted one of the pearl-handled revolvers. “The bullets in this gun aren’t fake, corporal.”

He drew the revolver from the holster and fired it into the air.

“Gather around gentlemen, we’re going to have us a court martial. Corporal Sutherland here is charged with serious offenses under the uniform code of military justice. We’ve got, insubordinate conduct, mutiny and sedition, theft, failure to obey, fraudulent enlistment.”

Sutherland had had enough. “You’re the fraud here.”

“Whoops, hear that boys? She just added disrespect toward a superior commissioned officer to the list.”

Sutherland ignored the laughter coming from the militiamen. Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses.

“You’re an idiot as well. Do you think I’m on my own? If you don’t let me go my friends will wipe you and your country club off the map.”

“No way, corporal. But you just convicted yourself. The added charges are treason and espionage.”

Sutherland saw where Kurtz was going. “Under the code, I’m entitled to legal representation.”

“No problem.” He turned to Krause. “You’re appointed to represent the corporal.”

The militiaman smiled. “She pleads guilty to all charges.”

“In that case, this court martial has no choice. Guilty as charged. Sentence is death by firing squad to be carried out at dawn.”

Krause squinted at the rising sun. “Close enough. Let’s do it.”

Kurtz seemed to snap out of a daze. “Hold on here, Sergeant. We’re not killing any of our own soldiers.”

“You said it yourself, general. Treason and espionage. Punishable by death under military code.”

“Yeah, but I just wanted to scare her.”

“She’s scared. Now we do our duty.”

Krause tugged on the handcuffs around Sutherland’s wrists.

The general grabbed his subordinate’s shoulder.

“I’m not letting you do this.”

“Try and stop me, you crazy old man.” Krause turned to the other men. “General Kurtz here seems to have turned yellow. And he wants to keep all these goodies for himself. I say we divvy them up. What do you say we vote me in as four-star general?”

There was a roar of approval.

“You can’t—” Kurtz began. He stopped in mid-sentence and clutched at his chest. His face slowly turned blue, then he dropped the scepter and crumpled to the ground. He convulsed once and became still. Krause bent over the general and felt for a pulse in Kurtz’s neck. When he stood up again he was holding the scepter and he had a grin on his face.

“Looks like I’ve just been promoted.”

There was another roar of approval. With his free hand, he dragged Sutherland to the mine and slammed her against a slab of boulder next to the opening. The back of her head hit the rock and her knees buckled, but she stubbornly remained on her feet.

She heard Krause yell, “Ready!”

Through blurred eyes she saw the militiamen assemble into a ragged line, facing her.

“Aim!”

She couldn’t believe this was happening to her.

“Fire!”

As Hawkins loped up the mountain road he cursed the war injury that had shattered his left leg. He and Calvin came to a sharp bend, then ran up another stretch of road to yet another hairpin turn. Which is when they heard the loud crack of several rifles being fired at the same time.

Hawkins felt a nameless dread pulling him back, but he kept on pushing ahead even though he feared it was too late.

An instant before Krause gave the order to fire, Sutherland saw movement out of the corner of her eye.

It was Sergeant Paine. She threw herself in front of Sutherland, her rifle aimed toward the line of militiamen, and yelled, “Stop!”

The firing squad’s blood was up, but at the sight of their comrade they raised their rifles into the air and let off a harmless volley.

Krause strode over to Paine. He towered over her, his face contorted in fury.

“What the hell do you think you are doing?”

The sergeant’s rifle was still aimed toward the squad.

“You can’t do this, sir. It’s murder. The general would never approve.”

Krause snatched the rifle from her hands and tossed it aside.

“I’m the general now. You have interfered with a court martial sentence against a traitor.”

“This isn’t a court martial. It’s a farce.”

“You tell him, girl,” Sutherland yelled.

Krause was practically foaming at the mouth. “If you do not remove yourself from the line of fire immediately you will be guilty of aiding and abetting treason and subject to capital punishment.”

“I’m not moving until you stop this,” Paine said with a stubborn set to her jaw.

Krause stepped behind Paine, brought the scepter under her chin and used it to choke her as he dragged her back to stand next to Sutherland.

As soon as he had her in place, Krause stood back and said, “We will proceed with the execution. Shoot anyone who does not obey my order.”

Krause raised his arm with the scepter.

“Ready!” Not pausing, he followed with a quick. “Aim!”

The next command never left his lips. There was a small thut sound and a round hole appeared in Krause’s forehead below the visor of his cap. His mouth stayed open in an expression of abject surprise, then his legs collapsed and he pitched face forward onto the ground.

Holding his sound-suppressed rifle to his shoulder, Hawkins stepped out of the woods and Calvin emerged from the other side with his CAR-15 at waist level.

Calvin snapped an order. “You know the drill, grunts. Toss your weapons in a pile and get down on your tummies. Hands behind you.”

While Calvin corralled the militia men, Hawkins went over to Sutherland. She planted a wet kiss on his cheek.

“I knew you’d find me.”

“You didn’t make it easy for us.”

“Sorry, Matt. I got angry because I hadn’t heard from you.”

“We were out of contact. Didn’t get your message until we got back to Kabul. What happened to that man lying on the ground?”

“That’s Kurtz. He had a heart attack trying to save me. This is my new friend Sergeant Paine. Sergeant, this is my old friend Matt. The general wasn’t all bad. Just a little crazy.” She glanced over at Krause. “Can you get the key to the cuffs? It’s in the front pocket of the guy you shot.”

Hawkins retrieved the key and unlocked the handcuffs. Then he picked up the emerald scepter, his fingers wrapped under the cross-bars.

“So this is what all the fuss is about.”

“Careful with that thing. It might get you killed,” Sutherland said.

“It wouldn’t be hard to find someone who’d kill to get his hands on a treasure like this,” Hawkins said.

“You don’t know the half of it, Matt.”

She led him to the ore carrier and lifted the lid on the box full of diamonds.

He shielded his eyes against the sparkle of sunlight reflecting off the gems. He was even more stunned when he looked into the boxes with the coins and emeralds. He handed Sutherland his rifle and told her to keep an eye on the militiamen. Calvin came over and stared at the treasure and deep laughter roared from his throat.

“Yeah, I know,” Hawkins said. “Joke’s on us.”

Calvin wiped the tears from his eyes. “You’ve got to admit that it’s pretty funny, chasing our asses around Afghan-land while the treasure’s sitting here.” He pursed his lips. “Now what do we do with it?”

“Not doing any good sitting up here on the mountain. Let’s see how strong these cub scouts are.”

Hawkins put the scepter back in its chest, retrieved his rifle, and then ordered the militia men onto their feet. He told them to move the boxes from the ore hauler into the back of the truck. When they were done, he and Calvin piled the seized weapons into the truck with the boxes.

“Thanks boys,” he said. “One more thing. Take your boots off and throw them in the truck. Socks, too.”

“You can’t do that,” one man protested. “It’ll take us days to get down the mountain.”

“You’ll all have a tenderfoot merit badge waiting for you at the bottom. Do it.”

The militia men grumbled, but did as they were told. Calvin got behind the wheel of the truck. Hawkins asked Paine to drive the general’s Jeep. Sutherland would ride in front. He climbed into the back seat to cover their retreat in case the militiamen decided to be fool-hardy. He’d call the police as soon as they were in the clear and let the authorities sort things out.

During the descent Hawkins called in a report to Abby on his phone. The two-vehicle caravan made it down the mountain side in half the time it had taken to climb up to the mine. As they drove through the camp they passed a number of recruits in training. Some may have wondered who Hawkins was but the general’s Jeep was a potent symbol of authority. At Sutherland’s direction, Paine drove to the Kurtz mansion. Sutherland got out of the Jeep and said she would be back in a minute. She dashed into the big house and emerged moments later with her computer bag slung over her shoulder.

Hawkins called Abby on the hand radio, gave their position and requested extraction.

Minutes later, they heard a thrumming sound. A shadow passed overhead. Hawkins got out of the Jeep and waved at a helicopter that was circling a couple of hundred feet over the mansion.

The helicopter landed on the weed-choked lawn. The door opened and Abby climbed out into the rotor blast.

“That was fast,” Hawkins said in greeting.

“We were waiting in a meadow a couple of miles from the gate.” She smiled when she saw Sutherland. “Looks like we’re one big happy family again. Who’s the lady in the soldier suit?”

“Sergeant Paine. Sutherland’s new friend. You’ve just been discharged from the militia, sergeant.”

Paine didn’t seem to hear him. She was staring at the helicopter.

“It’s black,” she said.

“Best we could do on short notice, sergeant.”

“Just like the general said would happen. Black helicopters.”

He pressed the Jeep’s keys into her hand. “That’s right. Now go home. Find a boyfriend. Get married and have kids. Shoot squirrels.”

Moments later Paine was in the Jeep, glancing in the rear view mirror as she drove toward the gate at full tilt.

“That was a sexist thing to say,” Abby chided. “You wouldn’t have told a man to get married and have children.”

“I told her to shoot squirrels, too.”

Abby shook her head. “Ready to fly?”

“After I show you something.”

He led her around to the back of the truck and opened the box that held the scepter. She touched the egg-size emerald and the diamond J.

“The scepter of Prester John. It’s unbelievably beautiful,” she said.

“And slightly lethal,” Hawkins said. “There’s more to see.”

He enjoyed Abby’s wide-eyed expression as he opened the chests one after the other.

Calvin backed the truck up to the cargo door and they moved the chests onto the helicopter. When they were done, Hawkins looked around the deserted old buildings. Sutherland had vanished.

Hawkins picked up his CAR-15 and started walking toward the buildings, which is when he heard a staccato blast and turned to see a motorcycle speeding his way.

The Harley skidded to a stop only a few feet from where he was standing. Wearing an ear-to-ear grin, Sutherland got off the motorcycle and pushed it toward the cargo door.

“Hope you’ve got room for one more item.”

They loaded the Harley onto the helicopter and lifted off. Within minutes, they had left Camp Kurtz far behind.

Cait lay on her back on the old cast-iron bed. Her wrists and ankles were tied to the frame even though she was in a deep drug-induced sleep. There was a faint sheen of sweat on her upper lip. Her breathing was shallow.

Marzak sat in a wooden chair next to the bed studying Cait’s finely-sculpted features. At one point, he leaned forward and lifted her head, brought a glass to her mouth and gently poured a trickle of water past her parched lips. His tender gesture had nothing to do with sympathy. It was like watering a plant. The drug in Cait’s system could cause dehydration and he didn’t want her kidneys to shut down. Cait was no use to him as dead bait.

He had passed what appeared to be an abandoned cottage while he was tailing her. The property was only a few miles from the turn-off leading to the Kurtz yacht, and he had returned there with his prize after knocking her out.

The cottage was indeed abandoned, though some furniture remained, and its remote wooded location was exactly what Marzak wanted. He had lifted Cait’s limp form from the trunk of his car and carried her into the bedroom. As she lay on the musty-smelling mattress, Marzak administered an antidote to restore her to consciousness. She gurgled like a baby and her eyes snapped open.

If she had not been on drugs, she would have screamed in terror at the sight of the killer at her bedside. But the drug had a calming, truth serum effect.

Marzak looked familiar, but she couldn’t place where she had seen him. He seemed friendly, helping her to sit up and plumping a thin pillow for her neck.

“My shoulder hurts,” she said, unaware that Marzak had used a Taser on her.

“The pain will go away soon. You’ll feel groggy for a minute, and your tongue will be thick.” He handed her a plastic water bottle. “It’s important that you drink.”

She glugged the water down in almost a single gulp and handed him the empty bottle. “More please.”

“After you answer a few questions. Do you remember Hawkins?”

A dreamy smile came to her face. “Oh yes.”

“When did you see him last?”

She struggled to recall. “We were flying from Afghanistan with some of his friends. They were very nice.” Her voice was slurred.

“Why were you with Hawkins in Afghanistan?”

“Seems so long ago.” She furrowed her brow. “I was looking for the Prester John treasure, and so was he. We met by accident at an ancient caravan stop.”

“Did you find the treasure?”

“It was gone. Kurtz took it.”

“Who is Kurtz?”

“An old explorer. He led an expedition to find the treasure. Moved it out of the cave years ago.”

Marzak gave her another bottle of water and while she drank he pondered the answer. Interesting. So Hawkins didn’t find the treasure after all.

“Why were you at the boat?”

“It was the Kurtz yacht. I’m writing a book. I wanted to see the vessel that may have carried the treasure back to the United States.”

Marzak’s pulse quickened. He leaned forward. “The treasure is in the U.S.? Where?”

The abrupt movement and change of voice stirred a faint eddy of fear in Cait’s memory. Her instincts told her there was reason to be afraid of this man.

“I don’t know,” she said, almost in a whisper.

“Where is Hawkins now?”

“In Colorado.”

“Is that where the treasure is? I must tell you that I will kill you if you say you don’t know again.”

She nodded. “He thinks Kurtz took the treasure there and hid it in a mine.”

“Have you heard from Hawkins since you parted?”

She shook her head and looked around as if she had lost something. “My phone.”

Marzak took a phone from his jacket pocket. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

“Yes,” she said with relief. “It has Matt’s number in it.”

“Would you like to call Matt to say hello?”

“Yes,” she said eagerly. She took the phone and looked up Hawkins’ number in the contact list and pressed the call button. When a voice answered at the other end, she smiled and said, “Matt. It’s me, Cait.”

Marzak reached forward and pressed the drug injector to her neck. There was a soft puff as the vapor entered her skin at high pressure. She blinked her eyes and frowned, then her head lolled and she slumped back onto the bed. Marzak took the phone from her limp fingers and brought it to his ear.

“Hello, Hawkins,” he purred.

The call came when the jet carrying the treasure east from Colorado was about an hour out from Washington.

Abby and Sutherland were stretched out asleep in their own rows near the front of the cabin. Hawkins and Calvin were at the rear of the cabin hashing out a strategy to find Marzak before he could set off the Prophet’s Necklace.

He couldn’t believe it when he answered the phone. It was Marzak. And he had Cait.

Keeping his voice as neutral as possible, he said, “Hello, Marzak. Thought you were still back in Afghanistan.”

“I arrived in the United States not long after you, and immediately arranged a reunion with Dr. Everson.”

“I want to talk to her,” Hawkins said.

“Not possible. She’s under the influence of a potent drug and will be asleep for another few hours.”

Calvin was looking at Hawkins with a curious expression on his face. Hawkins put his finger to his lips and pressed the speaker phone button.

“What do you want, Marzak?”

“You’re very impatient, Hawkins.”

“Why waste time on the small talk? Let’s cut to the chase.”

“I agree. Dr. Everson told me the treasure wasn’t in Afghanistan.”

“We struck out, sad to say.”

“Don’t play games, Hawkins. She told me about Kurtz bringing the treasure back to Colorado. You have it.”

“Only part of it,” Hawkins said. “The Prester John scepter. I’m looking at it now.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“Hang up and I’ll send you proof.”

“Make it fast. Dr. Everson’s vital organs will shut down if I don’t administer an antidote.”

Hawkins severed the connection. “You heard him. We’ll have to do some fancy footwork if we’re going to get Cait out of this alive.”

“He’ll kill her and try to kill you no matter what we do,” Calvin said.

“That’s why we need to stall and control the situation as much as possible. He’s using Cait to lure me in.”

Calvin’s lips tightened in a grim smile. “And we were worried we wouldn’t be able to find him.”

“I never expected Cait to be in the middle, but he’s not the only one who knows how to set a hook.” He handed his phone to Calvin and opened the box on the seat next to him. He lifted out the scepter and held it up.

“Say cheese,” Calvin said. The phone’s camera flashed.

Hawkins sent the photo to Cait’s phone. Marzak wasted no time calling back.

“Congratulations, Hawkins. You have succeeded where I failed.”

“Dumb luck, Marzak. Here’s the deal. I give you the scepter. I get Cait. Alive.”

“You must think a lot of Dr. Everson to give up something worth millions.”

“It’s nothing to me. My mission was to find the treasure, not decide what to do with it. I’ll need time, though.”

“Make it fast. You’re not the only one who’s impatient.”

“True, but we are both realists. I’m in an airplane on my way from Colorado. We’re not due to land for another couple of hours. Pick a place for the exchange that’s not far from Washington.”

“I’ll call later with the location.”

Hawkins had no intention of improvising his plans last-minute.

“Uh-uh. Now or never.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line, then Marzak said, “We will meet in three hours at the old Kurtz yacht. It’s on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Come alone.”

He gave Hawkins directions.

“I’ll be there with the scepter,” Hawkins said.

Cait’s phone went dead.

Hawkins had a determined set to his prominent jaw. “You heard him. We’ve only got a few hours to put this thing together. Marzak will spend that time setting the trap with Cait as the cheese.”

“He’ll be a lot more careful than the last time we met him,” Calvin said.

Hawkins placed the scepter back into its box. “Yes, but this little bauble has a way of clouding a man’s mind. We can use Marzak’s scepter obsession against him. And he doesn’t know about our secret weapon.”

“That’s good, man.” Calvin wrinkled his nose. “Only I didn’t know we had one.”

Hawkins cocked his ear to the soft snores coming from the sleeping women. “Actually, we have two.”

The old yacht had so many possibilities for an ambush that Marzak had difficulty narrowing them down. As he walked onto the rotting hull he focused on two potentials. The strategic and the poetic.

He scouted the woods around the wreck but it was obvious that anyone trying to come that way would have to cross the marsh and hack his way through heavy undergrowth.

Carrying a leather satchel, he walked out onto a rickety pier. Hawkins and his friend were former navy SEALs and a water approach was not out of the question, but the soft muck of the mud flats bordering the shore cut down possible access. Anyone coming from the bay would have to use the dock.

He retraced his steps and found a loose plank around half way back. He pulled it up, armed a small but powerful mine and slipped it under the board. The weight of a footstep on or even near the board would depress the pressure plate and trigger the explosion.

He went back to the yacht and strolled through the dining room. A few feet from the bar he detected a sponge-softness to the deck. He pried up several planks. A miasma of rotting plants rose through the opening. He explored the bilge with a flashlight, then he removed several supporting boards and replaced the single layer of deck.

In his mind, he created the poetic scene that would greet Hawkins.

Hawkins would drive down the only road, park, and walk into the yacht. He would be armed, of course. Marzak would be surprised if he weren’t. Hawkins would approach the bar with scepter in hand and fall through the deck to his armpits. Marzak would pluck the scepter from his hands and proceed to kill him after they had a talk.

Sheer poetry.

Though Hawkins was painfully aware that the gang of misfits at his command was no SEAL Team Six, he could not have been prouder, or more amazed, at the way they had come together in Afghanistan. But for all his brave talk about secret weapons, he knew that the rescue attempt needed the skills of an elite counter-terrorism team versed in the refined elements of assault, like the group that took down Bin laden.

Marzak was a ruthless and experienced opponent and the fact that he had a hostage complicated things exponentially. Cait would be caught between competing forces. Luck simply could not be part of the equation. Nor could blunt force.

Hawkins had designed dozens of SEAL missions. Some had succeeded. Some hadn’t. But every one of them was a work of art as well as an exercise in military science. He knew that a successful mission had to be a combination of desperate creativeness and painstaking planning.

“We’re going by the book,” Hawkins said. “First, Molly,” he turned to Sutherland, who was munching on her second blueberry muffin, “you’re intel. We’ll need an instant summary of everything there is to know about the Kurtz yacht.”

“I’ve already got a folder in my Prester John file.”

“Good. Narrow it down to what we need.”

Sutherland stuffed her mouth full of muffin and booted up her computer.

“Next, operational strategy. It has to be delicate. I’ve—”

Abby cut him off. “C’mon, Matt. You’re stating the obvious. We’re all very aware that we can’t bomb the crap out of the target and then send in the marines. The objective is simple. Get in. Neutralize Marzak. Save Cait. Get out.”

“That’s about right, Abby.” Hawkins silently cursed the insanity that had persuaded him to reunite with his ex-wife. “But if you’ll let me continue, I’ve already ruled out dropping in by fast-rope.”

“Not fast enough,” Calvin said. “Marzak would have too much warning.”

Hawkins said, “A land assault would be limited as well. Not enough options. My guess is that, no matter how I come at him, Marzak will use Cait to draw me in where he’ll have something nasty planned.”

Sutherland had been listening with one ear. Not taking her eyes off the screen, she said, “Here’s the CV on the yacht. Steel-hulled, built by Camper and Nicholson boatyard back in 1919. One of their early diesels, switching over from steam engines. It was a hundred-forty-five feet long. Here’s a photo.”

The computer screen showed a white yacht with a single smokestack, three decks and the almost straight-up-and-down bow typical of ships of its day. There were several photos of the luxurious interior, with its classic salon and spacious stateroom.

“How did the yacht get to Maryland?” he asked.

“After Hiram died his family sold it. It was used as a cruise boat on the Chesapeake, then went to a buyer who gutted the interior and turned the yacht into a waterside restaurant. The owner went bankrupt, the restaurant closed and it went into real estate trust. This picture shows the yacht in 1979.”

“Ouch,” Calvin said. “The old gal must have had some hard times.”

The paint on the vessel had peeled off and huge rusty blotches ravaged the hull like the effects of disease. The tall windows were broken. Sections of deck had been unevenly cut away with torches.

“Got anything on the restaurant interior?” Hawkins asked.

Sutherland clicked the computer cursor. “These photos are from a newspaper article.”

The grainy black-and-white pictures showed the dining room and the bar. Hawkins paid particular attention to a diagram of the restaurant’s lay-out.

“What’s your assessment, Cal?”

“Lots of places to set up an ambush. But there are a dozen ways to sneak on board, too.”

“You’re going to have to be the ‘sneakee.’ Marzak is expecting me, and he’s got Cait.”

“I’m going to like being back in my natural habitat. H. 2. O.” Calvin tightened his lips and turned to Sutherland. “You got an overview showing where the boat is in relation to its surroundings?”

A satellite photo of the Maryland shore appeared on the screen. Sutherland zoomed in until the outline of a peninsula appeared.

“Kinda looks like a lollipop,” she said.

The narrow section of the peninsula was a causeway leading to the widening, roughly circular tip of land. It was surrounded by shallows between the upland and the darker open water. The elongated lines of the yacht became visible. “Newspaper story says a hurricane pushed the yacht onto land and washed in silt that made it impossible for boats to come in and tie up.” Sutherland enlarged the image up, showing a long dock sticking out into a marsh.

Calvin said, “You come in by land, I make it by water. Classic pincers maneuver. You distract him here.” He pointed to the dining room. “I come up through the marsh, sneak aboard the boat here and come in the kitchen. Might even stop at the bar to order a rum coke.”

“You really think it will be that easy?” Hawkins said.

“Naw. I was kidding about the rum coke.” Calvin asked Sutherland for a geological survey chart of the Eastern Shore. The water showed only a foot or two of average depth close to shore.

“There’s almost no water close to the upland,” Hawkins said.

“If this wetland is anything like a Louisiana bayou, it’ll be mostly mud. No way to walk across it. And no telling what shape that dock is in, but it’s sending off real bad vibes.”

“Marzak vibes?’

“He likes to play with explosives and he’d expect us to try something funny. If I were him, I’d figure you to come in across the causeway. But he knows you’ve got back up with me, so he’d booby trap the only other access.”

“Makes sense. What about placing explosives in the swamp?”

“Be tough to lay down charges in the water. Big area to cover and he’d figure it’s too shallow for a boat and too muddy for walking.”

Hawkins pictured the scene in his mind. Driving across the causeway. Climbing onto the yacht. Looking for Marzak, who’d lay down a trail for him to follow to a trap.

“Let’s use Marzak’s MO against him.”

He outlined his thoughts.

“Might work,” Calvin said. “It would depend on precision timing, no margin for error and luck, but it would make a hell of a distraction. What if the dock isn’t booby-trapped?”

“Then you’ll have to come up with your own distraction.”

Abby had been listening to the back and forth.

“Is this as close to surgical precision as you can get?”

“ ’Fraid so, Abby. A lot can go wrong. But we’ll look at all the eventualities and build layers of backup. That’s all we can do.”

She nodded, but the expression on her face showed she was still worried.

“Matt, there’s something I have to say to you.”

“Uh-oh,” Calvin said. “I feel another one of those tender moments coming on. Hey Sutherland. Let’s get us a couple of muffins.”

Sutherland grinned, the computer cover snapped shut, then she and Calvin headed for the galley.

“I’m waiting,” Hawkins said when they were gone.

“Matt, I’ve really grown to like Cait and I’d hate to see anything happen to her.”

“Same here, Abby. That’s why we’re going to make this work.”

“I know you will, but I’ve got to ask you something that sounds really stupid. You’d be willing to give up the scepter for her. Would you do the same for me?”

“No,” Hawkins replied, his mouth widening into a grin at her crestfallen expression. “I’d exchange the whole Prester John treasure for you.”

Abby smiled. “Damn you, Hawkins!”

He threw his palms wide. “What?”

She leaned over, kissed his lips and headed for the front of the cabin. Then, abruptly, she turned and said, “Excuse me. I’ve got to make some phone calls.”

Hawkins watched with a puzzled expression in his eyes as Abby settled into a seat with a phone against her ear. Then he punched out a number on his own phone and when a voice answered, he said, “You were right about the snake pit, Commander Kelly.”

“Hawkins! Damn. Hope you had plenty of snake repellent.”

“We used so much that we ran out.”

“That bad?”

“Worse, commander.”

“Sorry, Matt. What can I do to help?”

Hawkins told him what he wanted and when he was arriving in Washington.

“I’ll have it waiting at the airport,” Kelly said. “Anything else?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Good luck, whatever you’re into.”

“Thanks,” Hawkins said, “I’m going to need it.”

Calvin backed a pick-up truck up to an abandoned boat ramp, and Abby and Sutherland unloaded a five-foot-long black rubber raft from the bed and carried it to the water’s edge. Calvin tied a nylon tow line running from the prow of the raft to his air tank. He stripped down to a body-fitting Speedo bathing suit and got into his custom-fitted black neoprene wetsuit.

He waded into the water and tested his closed-circuit re-breathing SEAL rig which was designed not to emit bubbles like conventional SCUBA gear. Then he and his helpers loaded a waterproof zipper bag onto the raft. He gave them each a quick peck on the cheek, and donned his mask, hood and flippers.

Abby watched him breast-stroke ahead of the raft, pulling it from shore, and as soon as he submerged, she called Hawkins to let him know that Calvin was on his way.

Hawkins acknowledged the message with a thank you, clicked the phone off and waited.

He was sitting in a car parked a quarter of a mile from the turn onto to the yacht driveway. A chart of the local waters was spread out in front of him. He tried to picture where Calvin would be, but he knew he could only guess at his friend’s progress. He broke into a broad smile of relief at the chirp of his hand radio.

A slow drawl came over the phone.

“Fish ain’t bitin’ on the crab meat I’m usin’ for bait. Anybody got any suggestions?”

Calvin was telling him that he had arrived at the boat dock.

“Try hangin’ a night crawler on your hook,” Hawkins said in lazy tone that had more Maine than Maryland in it.

“Thanks, Cap. Let you know how it goes.”

The cornball code may have been overcautious, but with Cait’s life at stake, Hawkins didn’t want the faintest possibility of a screw-up.

Now it was his turn.

He started the car engine and drove to the restaurant driveway, turned in at the No Trespassing sign and bumped along the cratered road to the weed-grown restaurant parking lot. The old yacht that loomed in the headlight wash was in even worse shape than the boat in the photo Sutherland had dug up.

He snapped the lights off, re-checked the load in his Heckler and Koch P-9 and slid the pistol back into the carbon fiber hip holster that was concealed by the hem of his long-sleeve black T-shirt. He slipped the strap holding a thermal imaging monocular around his neck and pulled on a navy baseball cap.

He got out of the car and reached into the back seat to open the ebony case. He removed the scepter, tied a nylon rope around the nexus of the relic’s arms, and slung the loop over his right shoulder. The scepter hung at his left side like a sword.

Hawkins took his time examining the yacht from stem to stern through the monocular, letting his gaze linger at each of the vacant windows. All was quiet except for the ka-chunk of a bullfrog’s bass against the soprano insect chorus. Hawkins started walking slowly toward the boat only to halt after a few steps. The phone in his pocket was vibrating.

“Right on time, Hawkins,” said the voice at the other end of the line.

“Hello, Marzak.” He squinted through the monocular. “This place suits you.”

“It appealed to my sense of the poetic. Dark and mysterious, like the human soul.”

“Actually, I was thinking about how it smells rotten.” Hawkins slid the scepter from his shoulder and held the jewel-encrusted relic above his head. “Let’s do the deal, Marzak.”

“Yes, let’s. Walk toward the boat and climb onto the deck at the mid-ships gangway.”

Hawkins lowered the scepter and slung it over his shoulder again. His hand dropped to his pistol holster and unsnapped the flap as he approached the base of the wooden gangway. He tested it with his foot to see if it would support his weight. The planks sagged and groaned, but didn’t break, so he continued onto the deck and stood in front of the doorway leading to the dining room.

The stench that issued from the dark portal was a combination of mold, rotted wood and bird and animal droppings.

This must be what the doorway to hell looks like, he thought.

Calvin was less worried about Marzak than the mud.

After he had surfaced and called Hawkins, he had slipped off his re-breather and put it and the Pegasus in the raft. Calvin hauled on the tow rope and pulled the raft with him through the saw grass until the water was less than half a foot deep.

It was no use, though. The muck was like quicksand. He pulled back until the water deepened and heaved himself onto the raft which sank almost to the bottom with only a few inches to spare.

He paddled through the grass until the front of the raft bumped into something hard. He reached out and found the edge of the floating platform that had been connected to the permanent dock. It rested on the mud with no room underneath for booby traps. The plastic foam pontoons sank even deeper into the mud when he rolled from the raft onto the platform. He placed the Pegasus unit and SCUBA gear on the platform.

He examined the old pier the platform had been secured to. The dock had once been level, elevated around four feet between twin lines of pilings, but now broken sections of planking sagged all along its length. He leaned over and looked at the underside of the stationary pier.

A red dot glowed beneath the dock. He rolled off the platform into the mud and slithered closer until he was under a small black box attached to a cigarette-sized packet of plastic explosives.

His eyes followed a wire that disappeared through the boards. Probably attached to a pressure plate device.

He checked for other booby traps and found none, and then he pushed himself back through the mud and climbed onto the platform. Calvin heaved the waterproof bag from the raft onto the floating dock and unzipped it, revealing what looked like a miniature tank.

The PackBot had been waiting at the airport as Kelly had promised. The machine was a mobile robot that had been developed by a company called IRobot and its first operational job was to probe the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Later, it was given to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Calvin and Hawkins had been introduced to it as a way to see into enemy caves without getting their heads blown off. But its most popular use was by soldiers who employed the tough little robots to clear away Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs as they were called.

The forty-two pound robot was about the size of a lawnmower without the handle, and it moved on polymer tracks that were designed to flip up and down, allowing the machine to climb stairs or rocks and even go underwater. Calvin unpacked the joystick controller and switched on the PakBot’s batteries.

With the gear removed, the raft might be buoyant enough now to skim over the shallow water to the shore. He radioed Hawkins with an update and then turned his attention back to the robot.

No SEAL operation Hawkins had ever been involved in had gone off without a glitch. Including this one. He thought he had prepared for every eventuality only to discover that he was wrong.

As Hawkins stood on the deck in front of the door to the yacht’s interior, Marzak called again.

“Welcome aboard, Hawkins. Come in. Don’t be shy.”

“Let’s deal out here in the open, Marzak. I want you where I can see you.”

“You’re being disingenuous, Hawkins. You’ve been using a night vision device. You’re also armed, no doubt. So what are you worrying about?”

“I jump at shadows. Sometimes I shoot at them.”

Marzak chuckled. “I’ll light the way for you. Keep your phone on.”

A moment later there was a soft flickering glow in the windows.

Marzak’s order to keep the phone on hadn’t been in the plans. Hawkins’ intention was to keep in touch with Calvin on their radios until the last second when he could signal that the time was right.

He had to alert Calvin that the plan had changed. He switched on the radio so Calvin could hear his every word and said, “I’m coming in, Marzak.”

Then he stepped through the doorway.

He saw the source of the light. A dozen votive candles were arranged in two clusters on the bar. One group of candles was burning at Cait’s head and the other at her feet. She was covered with a sheet.

Marzak had turned the bar into an altar. He stood behind Cait like the high priest at a pagan sacrificial ritual. He wore a sweatshirt with the hood over his head, intensifying the image. The candlelight reflected off the shiny blades of a long, two-edged knife he held raised in his hand.

“Where should I start carving? Would you like a wing or a leg, Hawkins?”

Hawkins kept his eye on the knife. Marzak could lop off Cait’s head in the time it would take to draw his pistol. He forced a laugh.

“Very theatrical. What are you supposed to be, some sort of satanic demi-god?”

Marzak pushed the hood back. Grotesque shadows danced on his face.

“Is this devilish enough for you?”

“Now you look like a creep out of a Grade B horror movie.”

Marzak’s smile suggested that he was more amused than insulted by the comment.

“I’m not the only one with a flair for theatrics. I recall the elaborate helmet you wore when you almost shot me down in Afghanistan. That was quite the close call. You nearly killed me.”

“That was my intention.”

Marzak chuckled and said, “Let bygones be bygones. Please step forward and hand me the scepter. Then I’ll back away. The woman will be yours.”

Hawkins clutched the scepter closer to his chest. “Not yet. I want to make sure she’s alive.”

“See for yourself.” Marzak moved back from the bar, putting himself at the edge of the halo of light.

Hawkins took another step toward the altar. He tried not to stare at Cait’s face. He had to be alert to his surroundings. The sacrificial offering, the candles, the sly tone of Marzak’s voice, all screamed the word trap at him. He had to stall until he figured it out.

“We’ve got more to talk about first, Marzak. The professor told me about the Prophet’s Necklace.”

“I’m not surprised. The professor seemed a man of divided loyalties. What did he tell you?”

“That the necklace is a string of sarin-laden explosives you placed near crowded population centers. And that you are the only one that can set them off. He called it connecting the strands and that it could be done with a phone call.”

“You’re correct about my role in placing the sarin, and the phone call, but I’m not the one who controls the clasp.”

“The Shadows?”

“I don’t work for the Shadows, even though they think I do.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Anyone who pays me.”

“In that case, I can make you rich beyond your dreams. The scepter is only part of what I found. I’ll trade the scepter for Cait. And I’ll give you the rest of the treasure if you identify who’s giving you orders.”

Marzak glanced down at Cait’s supine form and a thoughtful look came to his face.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

Calvin was tying a flashlight to the top of the robot when the voices started coming over the radio. Something had gone wrong.

As he listened, he activated the robot’s forward control. It moved forward slowly, navigating the undulating boardwalk, and stopped around a foot from where he had seen the booby trap. He climbed back into the raft and pushed away from the platform until he was a safe distance off shore.

Hawkins slid the scepter off his shoulder.

“This bauble is only part of it,” he said. “There are twenty chests of treasure. Each one is filled with a different type of gem. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, lapis lazuli. You name it. You could retire in splendor to your own island.”

“Tempting, Hawkins. How do I know you’re telling the truth about the treasure?”

“Easy. I can lead you to it.”

“Agreed. The scepter for now, please. Then we’ll talk about the rest of it.”

He’s agreeing much too fast, Hawkins thought.

“OK. Your call. Just hope this thing doesn’t blow up in your face.”

“What are you talking about, Hawkins?”

He held the scepter up. “I’m talking about the explosive nature of this thing.”

“You’re talking like a crazy man.”

“Maybe, but this thing has already caused a lot of fireworks.”

Calvin finally realized what Hawkins was trying to tell him.

Duh. He pushed the forward button. The robot’s treads hit the pressure plate.

Kaboom!

The middle of the dock disappeared in a blinding ball of fire. Flaming splinters of wood fell from the sky like rain.

Calvin was already on the move.

Cait moaned at the noise of the explosion and tried to lift her head.

Marzak cocked his ear as the echoes faded. “I forgot to tell you. I set up a surprise for anyone attempting to come ashore at the old dock.”

“You killed Calvin, you sonofabitch! The deal is off.”

Hawkins backed up. He wanted to draw Marzak away from Cait.

Marzak came around the side of the bar, holding the dagger forward like a fencer, and advanced slowly. Hawkins raised the scepter and swung it like it was a Louisville Slugger. Marzak jumped back out of the way.

Cait was up on one elbow, taking in the confrontation with bleary eyes. She pushed herself off the bar, stood on shaky legs and tried to walk. She was only vaguely aware of knocking something over with her knee as she made her way unsteadily around the bar.

Marzak thrust the knifepoint at Hawkins, who sucked his gut in and took another swing with the scepter. Marzak circled, trying to drive Hawkins toward the weakened floor in front of the altar. He dodged another swing, and got in a quick swipe of his knife that caught Hawkins in the ribs.

Marzak saw Hawkins wince with pain and lower the scepter. The next cut of the blade would catch Hawkins below the Adams apple.

Cait was still unsteady on her feet, but she made it around to the front of the bar. Her groping hand accidentally pushed a candle over the edge. There was a plouff sound as the gasoline she’d knocked over a moment earlier ignited.

Flames roared up, enveloping the back of the bar and the rotten deck.

Hawkins jumped back to avoid another knife thrust. He felt a warm wetness in his chest where he’d been cut. He instinctively moved to protect Cait only to feel his feet break through the rotten planks. He crashed through the deck up to his armpits and struggled to keep from falling in any further. His pistol holster was inaccessible.

Marzak sheathed his dagger and extended a hand.

“Give me the scepter, Hawkins. I’ll pull you out.”

Hawkins lifted the relic, but when Marzak moved closer, Hawkins swung it at his ankle. The cross arm connected with skin and bone. Marzak yelled in pain and backed off. His hand went to his belt holster and he drew his pistol and pointed the muzzle at Hawkins’ face.

Speaking quietly, he said, “Fine, I’ll just go ahead and kill you now, Hawkins. Matter of family honor for killing my brother. Too bad. We’re arrows from the same quiver, you know.”

“What are you talking about?”

Marzak smiled, but instead of firing the gun, he shuddered, as if he’d been hit by a blast of wind, and his mouth dropped open in a look of shock. His free hand groped at his shirt where two holes had appeared as if by magic. He squinted through the flames roaring around the bar, fired his gun at something unseen then turned and ran into the dining room and out onto the deck.

Flames were rapidly spreading through the lounge and the air was thick with smoke. Cait rushed forward to give Hawkins a hand, but then a familiar voice was yelling at her to stand aside.

Calvin stepped past her and reached for the scepter, wrapped his hands around it and pulled Hawkins out like a cork from an old bottle of wine.

With Calvin in the lead, they ran through the dining room, weaving their way through the swirling pockets of flame dancing around like fiery wraiths. Tongues of yellow fire licked at their heels, but then they were out the door and down the gang plank.

The massive bonfire consumed the boat from stem to stern and blistered the air with its heat.

As they hastily made their way to the truck in the undulating light from the blaze, Hawkins scanned the old parking lot and the surrounding woods

Marzak was nowhere to be seen.

The conference room in the office labyrinth of Global Logistics Technologies was unremarkable, but the same could not be said about its four occupants.

Hawkins stood in front of a blank presentation screen holding a laser pointer. He had bagged his quasi-military outfit in favor of Woods Hole casual: jeans, chambray work shirt and work boots. Hawkins’ big-boned physique and craggy features would have been an imposing presence anywhere, but the Afghan sun and wind had brought out the reddish skin tint he’d inherited from his Micmac ancestors and the rigors of the Afghan mission had hardened his features, especially around the dark eyes.

Seated at a table directly in front of Hawkins was Calvin, who looked like an entertainment lawyer in his thousand dollar Armani suit. Next to him was Abby, smartly dressed in a beige pants-suit and lavender blouse. They both wore a watchful wariness that wasn’t there at the start of the operation.

The only one not to have changed was Sutherland who sat at a table with her battered laptop open in front of her. She wore her standard outfit of jeans and sweatshirt. With the slight smile under her pudgy cheeks and innocent eyes blinking behind her glasses, she could have been a bank teller about to cash a check at the drive-up window.

“Cait is still recovering from her drug hangover,” Hawkins announced. “She’ll be okay in another day or so. Unfortunately, Marzak is still on the loose and he’s got the capability to detonate the sarin bombs at any time.”

“Should we let the authorities know what’s going on?” Calvin asked.

“Since we don’t know the target cities, there’s not much the authorities could do short of evacuating whole cities. People could be killed in the panic. I think the key here is still the treasure. Abby?”

“I had the scepter and other chests crated and stored in a temperature controlled vault on the floor below. I’ve authorized vault access for everyone in this room.”

“Thanks, Abby. With the treasure removed from circulation, we’ve torpedoed the Shadows’ plans for now. But if we believe what Marzak told me, he’s not working for the Shadows and the decision to tie the clasp on the Prophet’s necklace isn’t his. He’s working for someone else.”

Abby nodded. “Makes sense, Matt. He could have set the plot in motion the second he was clear of the boat, but he didn’t, and he hasn’t since, which means that he’s either biding his time or telling the truth about the sarin attack being out of his hands.”

Hawkins nodded. “Marzak is only one piece of a jigsaw puzzle that looks like a Pollock painting. That’s why I’ve asked Molly to work on a forensic search to help us assemble the pieces as fast as we can.”

On cue, Sutherland clicked the computer mouse, and dozens of facial images filled the screen. At the center of the photo-montage was the image of the emerald scepter.

“These are the faces of every individual, including us, who has a connection to the Prester John mission,” Hawkins said. He pointed the laser dot at a square that had a close-up picture of a rat. “What’s this?”

“That’s Rashid,” Sutherland explained. “I didn’t have a photo of him.”

“That rat’s a lot better looking than ol’ Rash,” Calvin said. “Good picture of me, though. Handsome and mean at the same time.”

“That other one looks like Omar Sharif, the actor,” Abby said.

“It is. That’s supposed to be Amir,” Sutherland said.

“Not bad,” Abby said. “But how is this going to help us find Marzak?”

“I’ll explain. When I first started digging into the lives of people who interested me, I’d go through search engines like Google. What I got was collard greens, turnips and beans.”

“Pardon me?” Abby said.

Sutherland blushed. “Sorry. That’s my West Virginia talking. You throw all those things in a frying pan back home and you get a dish called a mess. There’s no way to separate one thing from the other. Same thing online, too, only it’s a mess of data. Lot of it is useless. That’s when I came up with Snoopster.”

Abby glanced at Hawkins with an expression of distress on her face. He responded with a shrug.

“My guess is that Snoopster is a computer program,” he said.

“That’s right. I named it after Snoop Doggy Dog. They use a data miner like this in some human resource departments to figure out someone’s character. It uses a huge list of key words to help sift the weevils out of the flour. In my program the key word at one extreme is Bad-ass. At the other end, it’s Saintly. I came up with a big list of things to measure a person by, and gave each one a point score. I tweak it with stuff that isn’t on the record, but that I know.”

“That seems pretty subjective,” Abby said.

“I know it’s not rocket science, but sometimes what I feel about someone is more accurate than what I know.”

Hawkins said, “It’s called instinct, Molly, and it’s kept me out of a lot of trouble.”

Sutherland smiled at the praise. “Depending on the point score, the person is dumped into files labeled Good Guy, Bad Guy and Maybe. Then I smooth out the rough files and come up with an estimate of what a person is.”

Suddenly intrigued, Abby leaned forward. “Could you give us an example, Molly?”

“Sure. I’ll use me. I got math awards in high school, and good marks for my army service. They gave me an honorable discharge, so that makes me a Good Guy. You take Rashid up there on the screen. Lies, steals, tries to kill and hurt people, and he’s an easy Bad Guy.”

“What about a Maybe?” Hawkins asked.

Sutherland smirked. “That would be you, Matt. You did good in the navy, but got screw-up points when you went before a board of inquiry that had you cashiered for being crazy.”

“That would make me a Bad Guy, wouldn’t it?”

She shook her head. “You went on to be an engineer who made some contributions to science. The fact that you were evaluated by a Bad Guy like Trask gave you goodie points too, but not enough to move you out of the Maybe category. That’s where I come in. I add in feelings, which could push you to the Good Guy category.”

Hawkins had to admit that Sutherland’s simple explanation made perfect sense. “Thanks, Molly. Can this program help us locate Marzak?”

“Not exactly, but it can give us an idea who he hangs out with. Like my mama used to say, ‘Tell me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.’”

“Hey, sounds like what my mama used to tell me when I got in with the bad crowd,” Calvin said. “Birds of a feather flock together.”

“Too bad you didn’t listen to your mama, or you wouldn’t be hanging around me,” Hawkins said. “Go on, Molly.”

“Sure. It’s all about connections. Watch.” She clicked the computer and the montage of faces was covered with a web of black lines. “It’s the Kevin Bacon thing. Everybody’s connected to everybody else. But how you’re connected makes a big difference. Amir is a drug guy, and has bad connections, but he’s also connected to you and he helped find the treasure and fight the bad guys.”

The lines disappeared and the photos were grouped on two sides of the scepter in clusters that were labeled Good Guys and Bad Guys.

“No more maybes?”

“Not when you factor in the details. The program connects the dots and arranges the photos depending on the strength of the link.”

Hawkins was disheartened that the bad guys greatly outnumbered the good, but he scanned the faces, moving from one side of the screen to the other. Most were pretty obvious, like Rashid and Murphy, who were paired side by side with the baddies, and Cait and Abby on the other side. Then there was him and Calvin.

But his wandering gaze rested on one photo in particular. He placed the laser dot on the photo.

“Are you sure this is accurate?” he said.

“As much as it can be,” Sutherland replied. “You take what you know and apply it to what you don’t know. The computer connects the dots.”

Hawkins couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The man in the photo had the same necktie he had seen when he met with the Newport Group. Then there was the cottony hair, the goatee and the lips pursed in perpetual disapproval.

And next to the man’s photo was an all-too familiar face.

Marzak.

A thought occurred to Hawkins. “Molly, could you Google the word Arrowsmith?’

“The rock band?”

“No. Arrow as in Arrowhead corporation.”

The first listing that came up was for the Sinclair Lewis novel by that name. He asked Sutherland to click on the next listing, a Wikipedia link.

Why hadn’t he seen it before?

Fletching is the art of putting feathers on arrows.

And the person who attaches the feathers is a fletcher.

The sprawling mansion built on a promontory that jutted defiantly into the dark waters of Narragansett Bay could have been the setting for a Gothic novel. With its octagonal turrets and soaring chimney stalks, the massive pile of granite looked as foreboding as a Norman keep. Surf whipped up by an offshore storm smashed the rocky bulkhead and spray pelted the mansion’s lower level windows, but all was serene in a second floor room that resembled the dark-paneled study of a London gentlemen’s club.

Five people sat in plush dark leather chairs gathered around a massive fireplace framed in mahogany taken from the gun deck of an 18^th century British man-o’-war. Brown-black shellac covered the once blood-soaked timbers that had been carved with scenes romanticizing the ship’s victories at sea.

Charles Fletcher sat at the center of the half-circle, allotting his time precisely to those on his left and his right. Like the others, he swirled a snifter of Louis Royer brandy and smoked a His Majesty’s Reserve cigar infused with Louise XIII cognac and worth about the same as the median weekly wage of the U.S. worker.

His audience of middle-aged men all wore tuxedoes, a dress code Fletcher required of his male dinner guests. Their facial features differed, but they glowed with the powerful good health of the wealthy, and their eyes shared the same avaricious hardness.

Fletcher had been continuing his dinner discussion of naval power and the Big Game, as Kipling called the competition among the Great Powers in the days of tsars and kings.

“The world outside of Europe and American was nothing more than a big garden full of ripe fruit and vegetables. The Great Powers were the gardeners who carved whole countries out of virgin land. Occasionally, they got into border spats, went at each other with pitchforks, and after a sufficient period watering the plants with blood, they joined together to battle the poachers.”

“You have a gift for metaphor,” one of the men said. “I would have loved to have gotten my hand on a pitchfork back in those days.”

“My point is, things really haven’t changed that much,” Fletcher said. “The main difference is the lightning speed at which events move now. We’re in one of those accelerated time warps.” He paused to let his audience chew on his words. “Now, if you gentlemen will all follow me into the media room we will talk about the important matter you came here to discuss.” Ever the thoughtful host, he said, “I’ve sent my cooking staff home. You’ll have to bring your own brandy.”

They entered a small auditorium and took their seats in the banked armchairs that faced a stage. Fletcher sat in the first row and tapped a control console in the arm of his chair. The lights dimmed and the curtains behind the stage parted to reveal a large wall screen that displayed a satellite picture of the earth. At a touch of a button, the image zoomed in on Asia, showing territorial borders in white.

“Here we are above Afghanistan, courtesy of Google earth,” Fletcher said. “This ancient and fabled land is often called the Graveyard of Empires for reasons our own military has discovered. Afghanistan is many things to many people, but I will wager that this is how the people in this room see it.”

Superimposed over the map was the familiar little man with the sly smile and white handle-bar mustache who symbolized the capitalist in the game of Monopoly. He was leaning on a dollar sign almost as tall as he was. The image triggered laughter that ended abruptly when the picture changed. The capitalist was frowning and he was leaning on a red rectangle with five gold stars. The flag of China.

The image brought forth a round of hoarse boos.

Fletcher smiled. “I can see there is unanimity of opinion in this room.”

“Is it that bad, Charles?” said Frank Sturmer, president of a vast minerals cartel and spokesman for the group.

“As I tell my navy students, without understanding the past we can’t change the future. Let’s go back a few years.” The red flag became a hammer and sickle. “The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. With the help of the CIA and U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles, the Mujahideen send the Russians packing. The military invasion was a failure, but the Soviets left their mark in other ways.”

“What ways?” Sturmer asked.

“I’m going to let an expert tell you,” Fletcher said. “Do you hear me, Dr. Davis?”

“Loud and clear,” a voice said over the speakers.

A man’s face appeared on the screen. He had thinning hair and a beard of matching gray. His crevassed features had the deep tan of someone who spent a great deal of time in the sun.

“Would you please introduce yourself to my friends?”

“No problem. My name is Lee Davis. I’m a geologist and I’ve been working for a number of years with the Pentagon.”

“Thank you, Dr. Davis. Can you please pick up where I left off?”

“Sure. As mentioned, Russian troops left Afghanistan in 1989. They had teams of specialists, including mining experts, scattered throughout the country, and many of these teams had to evacuate before they could collect all of their data. Inevitably, much of the mining data was lost, but some of it ended up with the Afghan geological survey library.”

“And what happened to it from there?”

“Three years after our guys drove the Taliban out of Kabul, a group from the U.S. Geological Survey went to Afghanistan to help with reconstruction. In the Afghan survey offices they stumbled on old survey charts and mining data. Stuff that looked important. So in 2006, they outfitted a navy Orion P-3 plane with advanced gravity and magnetic measuring gear and flew over around seventy percent of the country.”

“Did they find anything promising?”

“Enough to bring them back the next year for a deeper look using equipment that produced 3-D pictures of mineral deposits under the surface. They turned the data over to a small group of geologists.”

“And what was the reaction?”

“We were astonished.”

“We?”

“I was part of the group.”

“Go on.”

“The government sat on its hands for two years. No one looked at the findings. The Pentagon had a task force to create business opportunities, but they were focused on Iraq. With things winding down there, they transferred the task force to Afghanistan. They looked at the surveys and measured the potential economic value of the deposits. The Pentagon guys couldn’t believe their eyes, so they brought in American mining experts to take a look on the ground. Next they briefed the Secretary of Defense and the president of Afghanistan.”

“It must have been a pretty big deal,” Fletcher said.

“A very big deal,” Davis said with a grin on his face. “They figured the potential value of the mineral deposits they had found was nearly a trillion dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Fletcher said.

“Hell yes. The country is bursting at the seams with all sorts of goodies. The iron and copper alone could make the country a major world producer. There are big deposits of niobium for use in making superconductor steel, rare earths, and huge gold reserves. Under the dry salt lakes in some areas of the country, there could be as much lithium as in Bolivia, which has the biggest deposits now.”

“Could you put the extent of the lithium deposits in perspective?” Fletcher said.

“Someone at the Pentagon said Afghanistan could one day become the Saudi Arabia of lithium! The Pentagon is helping the Afghans develop a system to put mineral rights out to bid. Unfortunately, not much has happened in that regard yet, especially in the south and east with all the fighting.”

“Suppose we had a magic wand that could end the fighting,” Fletcher said. “Based on your findings, what is the likely scenario for minerals development?”

“The development money would come pouring in. It would dwarf the opium trade. Minerals would become the backbone of their economy. Afghanistan could become a powerhouse.”

“And who might these investors be?”

“U.S. mining companies. Multi-nationals. But mostly developing countries that need important minerals to sustain their growth.”

“What about China?”

“Already a player. They bribed the Afghan minister of mines to let them place the winning bid on a copper operation. He got fired, but the Chinese are in charge of the Aynak copper mine in Logar province. They’re hungry for more and will probably come in using proxies.”

“Very interesting and insightful. Thank you for your time, Dr. Davis.”

“My pleasure.”

The screen went blank. Fletcher turned to Sturmer.

“I think Mr. Davis just answered your question about how bad it is with his comment about the Chinese copper mine. This goes beyond economic interests. Control of minerals is of strategic value. China has used its control of rare earths to push Japan around. The U.S. is heavily dependent on Chinese minerals, which means we could be next in line for blackmail.”

“But our army is in charge of the country now,” Sturmer said. “The only way the Chinese can come in is if they choose to go up against our guys in combat.”

“The Chinese know that and are working with elements of the Pakistani intelligence service to broaden their influence in Afghanistan. This has been made easier by the fact that some Pakistani intel people see China as a counterweight to their arch enemy India. The Chinese are aware of this and are using the Pakistanis to cultivate links with insurgent groups as a strategic hedge so they’ll have influence in Afghanistan once the U.S. leaves Kabul.”

“Looks like the Chinese are making an end run,” Sturmer said.

The satellite picture of Afghanistan reappeared and the camera zoomed in on a body of water shaped like a long figure eight.

“Exactly. They hope to score a goal. Here. The salt flats around this lake cover some of the biggest lithium deposits in the country. This province is a lynchpin. If the Chinese-Pakistani cartel takes control of it, it will become increasingly difficult to stop them from doing the same in other parts of the country where they can negotiate with the locals or corrupt central government officials. Companies like yours and the others here in this room would be nudged out.”

“By God! We’ve shed blood to hold onto this piece of real estate,” Sturmer said. “The men in this room represent some of the biggest minerals extraction companies in the world. We deserve exclusive rights.”

Fletcher raised an eyebrow. He was aware that the only blood Sturmer and his colleagues had ever shed came while they were shaving and that they regarded the U.S. armed forces as an appendage in the service of their corporate interests.

“Calm down, Kurt,” he said. “No one is going to walk into that province with a handful of Renminbi. It’s controlled by a drug warlord named Amir Kahn.”

“Can’t our guys take him out?’

“That would be unwise. He’s connected by family ties to the ruling government and the Haqqani network that has been supporting the insurgents. Elements of the Pakistani intelligence services recently tried to remove Amir. Our intention was to let them do the dirty work for us, then move in. Unfortunately Amir survived the assault.”

“That is unfortunate,” said a guest. “How do we pry this guy out?”

“Simple. With a carpet-bombing campaign and permanent occupation of the border regions that puts up a big No Trespassing sign telling the poachers they will be shot on sight.”

Sturmer laughed. “I like it, Charles. There’s only one problem, the U.S. government wants to get out of Afghanistan and the voters are tired of the whole war. We’re going broke. Bridges, roads and schools have become a priority. People in Afghanistan want us out. Our metaphorical gardener is tired from tending the cabbage patch.”

“What if we made him untired?” Fletcher said. “What if something happened that would marshal public opinion to put aside its misgivings, reorder those priorities and get behind the massive effort I’m talking about?

“Last time that happened was after 9/11.”

“What if something happened that was even more horrendous than 9/11?”

“Is that a possibility?”

“As an intelligence officer, I would say that it is very much a possibility. And we had better be prepared.”

Sturmer made his voice heard above the murmurings.

“What do you need from us?” he asked.

“Your discretion, to begin with. Then the usual things. Money. Influence on Capitol Hill, so that when the time is ripe, you can move in with your heavy equipment at an instant’s notice.”

“I think I can speak for the others when I say that we have implicit trust in you, Charles.”

He went around one-by-one to the others in the room and got their agreement.

“Thank, you gentlemen,” Fletcher said. “I will keep you informed through my old friend Kurt. I’ve arranged for a car to take you back to the airport.”

Fletcher saw his guests to the front door, and watched the stretch limo until its taillights vanished down the long driveway which was still wet from the rain. He went back to his study, poured a couple of fingers of cognac into a snifter and sat in a leather chair in front of the windows.

The rain scratched against the glass and the rumble of thunder had grown louder. The storm was moving fast. His favorite weather. He took a sip of brandy and glanced toward the fireplace at the far end of the study where he saw a purple plume of cigar smoke rising above the back of the chair he’d been sitting in earlier. He realized that he was not alone.

Fletcher put the snifter down on his desk, quietly opened a drawer and filled his hand with a compact SIG Sauer P228 semi-automatic pistol. He eased the safety off and pointed the muzzle at the back of the chair.

“Turn around so I can see you,” he said in a calm voice. “I have a gun.”

Slowly, the chair swiveled around. There was a red glow as the silhouetted intruder exhaled a cloud of smoke.

“Who are you?” Fletcher said. “Be quick with your answer!”

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten my face so soon.”

Fletcher lowered the pistol.

“Damnit, you could get yourself shot, Hawkins.” He turned a desk lamp on.

Hawkins got up and came over to settle into a chair facing the desk. Moisture matted his thick hair and beaded his black windbreaker. He swirled the liquid in the snifter and took a sip.

“Damned fine brandy. Good smoke, too. Helped myself. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Glad you appreciate my hospitality,” Fletcher said. “What are you doing here?”

“I came for my discharge papers according to our agreement.”

Fletcher opened the drawer that had held the gun. He pulled out a thick brown envelope and placed it on the desk blotter. “You are now officially sane as far as the navy is concerned. How did you get in?” he said.

“Standard SEAL insertion. Fast-roped in by helicopter.”

“I never heard—”

“Just joking, Dr. Fletcher. I climbed the porte-cochere to a second-floor window.”

“It would have been far easier if you rang the doorbell.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt your fireside chat and movie show.”

Fletcher’s eyes narrowed. “How much did you hear, Hawkins?”

“Enough so that I know what it was all about. Professor Saleem said there was a bigger prize here than the Prester John treasure. I’d say a trillion dollars in minerals qualifies for that designation.”

“That’s not all it was about, Hawkins. This was about national security.”

Hawkins’ cutting laugh brought a frown to Fletcher’s jowly face.

“So those tuxedoed fat cats are just patriots taking up arms to defend their bank accounts?” Hawkins said.

“They are wealthy mining officials, but in their own way they are foot-soldiers in a worldwide struggle in which our country is engaged.”

“Do tell.”

“I understand your skepticism. What do you think would happen if the Chinese gained monopolistic control of the rare minerals like lithium? We and China both devour natural resources to fuel our economies, which support our military. Being denied access to those resources would fatally weaken us as an economic and military power.”

“So by plundering Afghanistan, you and your rich pals defend the U.S.”

“You seem troubled because someone will make money off this arrangement.”

“From the look of this mansion and the quality of your liquor cabinet, you, apparently, are not troubled in the least.”

“People have always gained wealth by conflict or the threat of conflict. We need symbiotic relationships with those who provide us with the means to be secure.”

“Relationships like you have with Arrowhead?’

“Quite correct.” He eyed Hawkins like a poker player. “How did you know?”

“You left latent fingerprints all over the place. It was only a question of lifting the partials and assembling them into a full set. Real CSI stuff.”

“Impressive. What else do you know?”

“Bits and pieces. Maybe you’d like to fill me in on the whole story.”

“You’ve played cozy with me, lieutenant. Why should I tell you anything?’

Hawkins shrugged. “It’s the only way you’ll learn how a psychotic ex-SEAL has been able to give you nightmares.”

The two men locked stares. Hawkins was not surprised that Fletcher was the first to back off. The man was consumed by his self-importance and would want to tell Hawkins how smart he was.

“We had three main goals. Eliminate the Shadows as a threat. Torpedo Pakistan’s effort to ease Chinese exploitation of the lithium fields and beyond. Gain control of the mineral wealth for the U.S. We would accomplish the first goal by luring the Doctor, the Shadows’ head, and his friends out into the open. The treasure was a bonus because the Shadows would eliminate Amir, clearing the way for us to move into the vacuum thus created.”

“What was Arrowhead’s role in all this?”

“You have to go back to 9/11 to understand the whole picture. The nation was frightened and confused. No one knew if another attack was coming. The CIA was empowered to use unusual methods to find and interrogate suspects.”

“Torture.”

Fletcher dismissed the comment with a wave of his hand. “They couldn’t let their methods be known, so they hired contractors who were willing to dirty their hands.”

“The Arrowhead corporation provided those contractors.”

Fletcher nodded. “I had been an intel consultant for Arrowhead. I set up an enhanced interrogation team.”

“Archer?”

“Archer. When news of the CIA interrogation methods went public, we were officially disbanded, although in reality our talents were used in Afghanistan in the intimidation program against the Taliban.”

“Intimidation? Another euphemism.”

“Assassination and torture, if you will. We were trying to persuade the Taliban to come to the bargaining table.” Even Fletcher had to smile at the irony of his statement.

“Tell me about Trask and McCormick.”

“Trask was head of our psychological unit. He oversaw how far a suspect could be pushed before breaking or dying. McCormick was in charge of delivering counter-punches.”

“What about Murphy?”

“He was a strong-arm man. An enforcer, if you will. He relayed your message about a trade for Trask and McCormick, by the way. Murphy is prone to error and loose talk, which is why he is no longer with us.”

“Dead?”

“I prefer to say he is longer in our employ. He told you the truth about Honest Abe. He warned the warlord that you were coming. The ambush was entirely out of our control.”

“But the cover-up and the slime job against me were not.”

“Your investigation could have led to our unit. Trask suggested the psychiatric discharge. People had already started asking questions as a result of your probe, so we left Afghanistan. We came back together when rumors of a very nasty group, the Shadows, surfaced, but we were revamped a bit.”

“Murphy called it a think tank with muscle.”

“That’s right. We had almost carte blanche at a high level of authority. The government was making progress against Al Queda, but was worried about unaffiliated splinter groups less easily identified. The Shadows were particularly dangerous. Their fanaticism went beyond the whole caliphate nonsense. They had lost family in drone attacks and wanted pure revenge against the U.S. They were run by a leader who had ties to the Pakistani intelligence service. We wanted to wipe out the Shadows leadership. The challenge demanded new strategy. You know how difficult it was to hunt down and kill Bin Laden, but he was an outlaw. The people we wanted were part of the fabric of society.

“We had to draw the Doctor and his friends out. Our only leads were the contacts they had made trying to radicalize U.S. citizens. They had grown tired of seeing the FBI roll up amateur young radicals over stupid mistakes, so we decided to give them people who had military skills to organize attacks in the U.S.”

“That’s where the Marzak twins came in,” Hawkins said.

“That’s right. The Marzaks had been on the fringes of Arrowhead, taking jobs no one else had the stomach for. They made it known to the Shadows that their skills were for hire. The Shadows wanted proof, so the twins performed an assassination on one of their enemies as a demonstration.”

“A marketing demo?”

“A good description. It worked, and the Shadows formed a connection with the Marzaks as we planned. But they were skittish. We were going round and round. The Marzaks attempted to lure them with a ruse called the Prophet’s Necklace, but they were still suspicious. It seemed the whole thing would fall apart. We needed to think outside the box.”

“Dr. Everson provided you with a path when her research uncovered the location of the Prester John treasure.”

“Correct. We knew they would be intrigued by the symbolic value of the treasure and the emerald scepter in particular.”

“Where did Saleem figure in this?”

“A useful fool. The ISI had sent him to the U.S. as a spy. Professor Saleem related the odd little story he had heard from his colleague to his cousin at ISI, who in turn told his contacts in the Shadows. The emerald scepter was like a piece of the True Cross, something mystical and powerful they could use to recruit new followers. The treasure would buy weapons and foot-soldiers.”

“But Dr. Everson messed up their plans when she told the State Department as well.”

“State was aware of the significance of the treasure’s location near a huge lithium deposit originally surveyed by the Soviets. The State Department passed the treasure information to the CIA. Eventually it made its way to Archer.”

“Saleem said he regretted telling his cousin about the treasure.”

“He became irrelevant after that point. The Shadows told the Marzaks to kidnap Dr. Everson so she could help find the treasure and then kill her to prevent her from talking to others. That was fine by us. We had visions of using her to lure their leaders someplace to view the treasure, and—”

He snapped his fingers.

“Sounds like a police sting. The cops tell the fugitive to come collect his lottery prize.”

“Not far off the mark. They wanted the treasure in the worst way. When Dr. Everson disappeared, they hired the Marzaks to put together the mercenary expedition to wipe out Amir and dive on the treasure.”

Hawkins leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head.

“You’re making me feel like a real Mickey the Dunce. I risked my ass on your crazy treasure hunt for nothing.”

“Don’t run yourself down, Hawkins. Your mission served a purpose. Word that a U.S. expedition was going in to find the treasure was a charade that would persuade the Shadows to send in their own people.”

“How did you pick me?”

“From our acquaintance with your previous Afghan service.”

“A certifiably insane guy with a messed up record?”

“You fit the job description. And you were expendable. Nothing personal about it.”

“It became personal when the Marzaks tried to kill me. Your call, too?”

“Regretfully. We assumed that your mission would fail, and were prepared to give you back up that would make sure that was the case. But you immediately took control of the operation, forming your own team and looked prepared to succeed. We forgot that even a crippled hawk has a sharp beak, so we had to clip your wings.”

“When that didn’t work you brought in Murphy who happened to bump into me at the airport and gave us Rashid.”

“Murphy was just a hastily devised back up plan.”

“Was Marzak’s ambush in Maryland part of that back up?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Didn’t Marzak tell you? He kidnapped Dr. Everson and held her hostage. We were able to free her.”

“I had nothing to do with that. It would have been a distraction. It troubles me that he went off the reservation.”

“Here’s something else to trouble you. We found the emerald scepter and the Prester John treasure in a Colorado mine.”

“Well, congratulations, but it means nothing to me compared to the country’s mineral wealth. If the Chinese gained control of Sheik Amir’s holdings, more takeovers would follow.”

“A new domino theory.”

“Correct. But revelation of the treasure’s existence would be an undesirable loose end that must be tied up. You see where I’m going?”

“You want me to tell you where to find it. But there’s another loose end that needs tying. The Prophet’s Necklace.” He turned in his chair and spoke into the shadows. “Isn’t that right, Marzak?”

A figure holding a gun stepped into the light. Hawkins stood and held his arms in the air while Marzak frisked him, then sat down again.

“You evidently have eyes in the back of your head, Hawkins.”

“The ones in the front work quite well. I saw Fletcher glance over my shoulder the same time he dropped his arm down to the alarm button on his desk. Welcome back from the dead,” Hawkins said.

“Death was not in the cards. I was well protected with my Kevlar vest. How did your friend set off the booby trap without getting killed?”

“Not very difficult. He sent in a robot that triggered the bomb.”

“Ingenious. Your friend ruined a good shirt, however.”

Hawkins touched his ribs where Marzak’s dagger had taken a slice out of his flesh. “That makes us even.” He turned back to Fletcher. “At what point did the Prophet’s necklace go from being a ruse to the real thing?”

“What makes you think that’s the case?”

“You confirmed it when you bragged to your friends that something was in the works that would surpass 9/11. Marzak told me he set it up, but he wasn’t the trigger man.”

Fletcher snarled. “You talk too damned much, Marzak.”

“He never identified you. He said he and I were arrows in the same quiver. In other words, we were both fashioned by the same arrowsmith. From what I know, the necklace also qualifies for that dubious honor. How many victims will you kill in the sarin attack?”

“Enough to provoke the anger and the determination to mount a major strike.”

“Pakistan might object to a carpet bombing campaign and occupation of its borders, and they have nukes,” Hawkins said.

“They will be told that their nuclear storehouses have been targeted and will be destroyed if they try to stop us.”

“So we’re in the region forever?”

“If need be. Decades are nothing in the history of occupations.”

“I was in Iraq,” Hawkins said. “We learned that occupations are a lot harder to maintain than they used to be.”

“We also learned a lesson from Iraq when we had to compete for the oil after sacrificing so much blood and money. This time we will secure the lithium fields first and use this as a bargaining chip to control the rest of the mineral riches for the U.S.”

“The American public isn’t going to like more fighting.”

“That will work in our favor. Instead of regular troops we will fill the ranks with contractors sent by Arrowhead and other security companies. This will give us even tighter control.”

“People are going to die, no matter who is involved,” Hawkins said.

“What of it? We’re talking about an international chess game in which pieces are often sacrificed for the greater good.”

“You’re insane, Fletcher. Those are your countrymen you’re sacrificing so you can control mineral wealth that doesn’t belong to you.”

“Then why don’t you ask your countrymen what they’ll think when China controls the lithium that goes into the batteries that will power their smart phones and electric cars. Ask people what they think of an economic catastrophe that will reduce our country to a third-world beggar state.”

“Too bad for you the Prophet’s Necklace is not going to happen.”

“Really?” Fletcher’s eyes narrowed to slits. He picked up his phone and quickly punched out a number. “It has happened.” Hawkins tweaked up the right side of his mouth in a lop-sided grin and reached for the envelope containing his discharge. He plucked a pen from a holder, wrote down a series of numbers, and pushed the envelope across the desk to Fletcher.

Fletcher’s jowls quivered as he read off the numbers. “How did you know?”

“I had Marzak’s phone number from our chat at the boat. He used his own phone to talk to me.”

“That’s right, Hawkins,” Marzak said. “I thought you might try to ping my location if I used Dr. Eversons’ phone.”

“Too bad. A friend who is very good at this kind of thing used it to track the slave numbers that would activate the explosives. The phone network has been neutralized, the FBI alerted and the bomb sites are being cleared.”

Fletcher turned his fury on Marzak. “You fool! Your carelessness has ruined months of planning.”

Marzak tucked his gun into his belt and started toward the study’s exit.

“I will take that as a dismissal. Congratulations, Hawkins. Till we meet again.”

“Hawkins killed your brother,” Fletcher said. “Don’t you want revenge?”

“That was your responsibility as much as Hawkins’, so you might want to temper your call for vengeance. I’m off to buy an island. You and Hawkins work it out. My contract is terminated.”

Fletcher aimed his pistol at Marzak’s back and in a quiet voice said, “So are you.”

Marzak spun around gun in hand, but Fletcher’s first shot caught him in the side when he was halfway into the pivot. The second bullet crashed into his rib cage and penetrated his heart. He crumpled to the floor.

Hawkins let out the breath he’d been holding. “Nice shooting for a history professor, Doc.”

Fletcher glanced at the body and back at Hawkins.

“You set this up,” he said, his voice quivering with rage.

“It’s getting so that you can’t trust anyone these days,” Hawkins said. He rose from his chair. “Thanks for the brandy and the smoke. I’ll be going along now.”

Fletcher brandished the gun. “I’m afraid this isn’t over.”

“It is for you.” Hawkins pulled out the microphone from inside his shirt. “My partner has monitored our entire conversation.”

Fletcher replied with a feral smile. “Recordings can be doctored. You think anyone will believe your crazy ramblings?”

“Maybe not. Which is why my partner is calling 911 to say there’s been a shooting at the Fletcher mansion. Dead man. Your gun. Your fingers on the gun. Even if you stay out of jail, your days as a wheeler-dealer are done.”

He picked up the envelope with his discharge and started for the door.

“Come back, Hawkins. Let’s talk. We can work this out.”

Fletcher’s shouts became fainter, drowned out by thunder as Hawkins descended the wide stairs to the first floor. He stepped out under the porte-cochere. Headlights were approaching through the slanting rain. Calvin was coming to pick him up.

As the storm raged around him, he realized something was missing.

For the past five years, even on bone dry days, he had lived with a gnawing sensation in his bum leg, and with this much moisture in the air the old wound should have been cranking out knife-edged spasms. But as the car stopped in front of him and he opened the passenger side door, his lips spread in a gargoyle grin and he let out a cry of joy.

“Hoo-ha!”

The pain that had plagued him for five years had vanished.

The antique Cadillac touring car arrived at the warlord’s house in the gray light of the pre-dawn. Amir had assigned two of his most trusted men to escort me to the ruins. Their names were Ghatool and Baht. Both men were armed with automatic rifles, and from their belts hung pistols and knives. Although the air was cool, we drove out of the village with the convertible top down and traveled for about an hour through the rugged countryside until we came to the remnants of an ancient paved road that led to the front gate of the abandoned caravanserai. As I gazed with wonder and excitement at the centuries-old caravan stop, I had no idea of the mystery, and the danger, waiting beyond the silent walls.

Cait leaned back in her in her chair and stared at the words she had typed into her computer. Her mind was thousands of miles and hundreds of years away from her Georgetown University office. She only half-heard the soft knock at the door and assumed it was the graduate student helping with her research.

Without taking her eyes from the screen, she said, “Come in and put the files on my desk if you can find room.”

The door opened and clicked shut. Someone approached and a deep voice said, “Sorry to interrupt. I happened to be in the neighborhood and hoped you could sign this.”

She looked up over the neatly-stacked piles of paper, books and folders that rose above the desktop like castle ramparts. Hawkins stood there holding her Silk Roads book. He had a wide grin on his wind-burned face. Her heart skipped a couple of beats. She smiled with pleasure, told Hawkins to have a seat and took the book from his hand.

Turning to the title page, she said, “Anything in particular you’d like me to say?”

He nodded. “Please dedicate it to your biggest fan.”

Her smile grew impossibly wider. She wrote in the book and passed it back to Hawkins, who read her words aloud:

“To Matt, my biggest fan, from his biggest fan.”

“Perfect,” he said, a gleam of amusement in his dark eyes. He thanked her and tucked the book into a canvas rucksack he had slung over his left shoulder. He surveyed the stacks covering her desk. “You didn’t waste much time getting back to work.”

“Research material.” Pointing at the computer screen, she said, “I’m sketching out a first draft of my book on the Prester John treasure.”

Hawkins shifted his tall body in his chair, glanced out the window, and brought his attention back to Cait.

“About that treasure,” he said.

“Is there something wrong?”

“I met with the rest of the team before I came over here.”

“And—?”

“Before I tell you what we talked about, maybe you could answer the question we asked ourselves. What do you think would happen if news of the treasure’s discovery went public?”

“It would be the biggest archaeological event since King Tut’s tomb was found. It would be all over the news. Every major museum in the world would compete to put the treasure on display. There would be television specials galore. It would change our view of history.” She tapped the computer screen. “And there would be dozens of books written.”

“That was pretty much our assessment,” Hawkins said. “Have you given any thought to who owns the treasure and the income it might produce?”

“I’m not a lawyer, but I can follow the historical trail of ownership. Prester John intended the treasure as a gift to the Pope, so the Vatican might put in a claim. Hiram Kurtz found the treasure; it’s possible his descendants would say it belongs to them. The families of the archaeologists on his expedition might want a piece. The government of Afghanistan could say it is rightfully theirs. It was found on Amir’s property and he might say he owns it.”

“Which means that given the treasure’s murky history, the litigation would involve dozens of lawyers worldwide.”

“It would take years and the ownership issues might never be resolved,” Cait agreed, but she wasn’t going to give up without a fight. “Even so, there is no reason the treasure couldn’t be displayed and its earnings put in trust until the ownership is cleared up.”

Hawkins was well acquainted with Cait’s persistence, and was prepared to deal with it.

“That might work.” He pointed to the computer screen. “But the treasure didn’t materialize out of nowhere. How did you plan to describe its discovery without mentioning me or the rest of my team?”

Her stubborn smile vanished. “That would be extremely difficult.”

“To say the least. Especially if you factor in the fact that our mission was top secret.”

“In that case it would be virtually impossible to tell the complete story,” she admitted. “But—”

“One more question. What would be the political reaction to the scepter?”

“That’s even more complicated than the ownership issue. The scepter symbolizes the ancient divide between the Christian and Islam worlds.”

“And that symbolism is why the Shadows wanted the scepter, hoping to stir up long-held animosities,” Hawkins said.

“It’s hard to say what would happen, with all the changes in the works stemming from the Arab spring. Everyone hopes that despotic regimes will be replaced with democratic rather than extremist governments.”

“This doesn’t seem to be a good time to turn up the heat,” Hawkins said.

She sighed. “I see where you’re going, but I can’t say I like it.”

“Sorry Cait, but it was the team’s unanimous decision that the scepter and the rest of the treasure remain secret. Abby will keep it stored in her vault. Only five of us will have access.”

Cait blinked. “Five?”

“We’d like to include you.”

“I appreciate your trust,” Cait said. She stared bleakly at the screen. “Damn. I would have loved to have wiped the smug smiles off the faces of my colleagues who scoffed at my claim that Prester John was real.”

“Maybe you still can. There is more than one kind of treasure.”

He reached into his canvas bag and pulled out a rectangular package wrapped in transparent plastic. He handed the packet to Cait who read the title on the leather bound volume.

“This is the journal of Master Philip!”

“We also voted that you should have access to this. Using the journal, you can backtrack to Prester John and his kingdom. Hell, maybe you can find Prester John’s tomb. You won’t have to mention the mission.”

“Where would I say I found the journal?”

“If anyone asks, say it was given to you by an Afghan warlord who found it in a cave.”

“That might work,” she said. “I could tell the story up to the time the treasure disappears. The revelations would rock the foundation of the historical establishment.”

“That should be very satisfying after all the doubt your research has met with.”

“Of course. But more satisfying would be setting the historical record straight and giving the participants their due.”

Cait’s eyes took on a dreamy look. She had left the present and her thoughts were being drawn to the past like metal filings to a magnet.

“About that dinner I promised you,” Matt said.

She snapped out of her daze. “Oh, Matt. I’m so sorry. I’ve got to get the journal translated immediately.”

“Is that a no?”

“I’m sorry, Matt. You know how hard this is to say after all we’ve been through together. It’s not forever?”

Hawkins smiled and said, “You’re not off the hook. I want a signed copy of your next book.”

He rose to say good-bye. Cait sprang from her chair, came around the desk, wrapped her arms around him and planted a kiss on his lips that curled his toes.

Abby was waiting for him outside.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“Okay. A little difficult.”

“Difficult? Then why do you look like the cat that swallowed the canary?”

He put his arm around her shoulders. “I was thinking about an idea I wanted to discuss with you.”

When he explained what he had in mind it was Abby’s turn to smile.

“It’s about damned time, Hawkins.”

The sleek red-hulled lobster boat glided out of the picturesque harbor, passing some of the windjammers that carried passengers to give them a taste of what it was like in the days of sail.

Hawkins was at the wheel and Abby stood on the deck taking photos of the tall-masted boats. Not a wisp of a cloud marred the luminous blue sky. The air was heavy with the salty scent of the sea. Squadrons of sharp-eyed gulls wheeled over the fishing boats searching for scraps of food. The breeze ramped up several knots as the boat entered the open waters of Penobscot Bay, but the bow cut through low mounding waves like scissors through blue silk.

Hawkins’ father had the wooden-hulled boat custom built for his lobster business. When he retired from fishing and became a shore-bound lobster distributor, he converted the forty-two-foot-long workboat into a comfortable pleasure craft that was ideal for island-hopping along the Maine coast. When Hawkins had called and asked to borrow the boat, he had felt like a teenager asking Pop for the keys to the family car, but his father had happily obliged, especially when he learned Abby was coming with him.

After the meeting with Cait, Hawkins and Abby had dashed home to pack their overnight bags and rendezvoused at the airport. Abby had arranged for a small jet that flew them to Portland, Maine where they picked up a rental car. Two hours later, they pulled up to the low-slung Hawkins family home on a rocky point. His father came out to wrap Abby in a bear hug and his mother beamed with delight. She still considered Abby as a daughter. Hawkins stayed long enough to be polite, eat some homemade apple pie and catch up on local gossip before saying that he wanted to get moving so he could make landfall before dark.

His father said the boat was fueled up, well-stocked with food and booze and ready to go. Within minutes of boarding, Hawkins and Abby set a course to Vinal Haven, southwest of Camden, and when they arrived they found an anchorage in a quiet cove. While Hawkins grilled a couple of rib eye steaks and sweet potatoes, Abby made a salad and opened a bottle of 2007 Bordeaux.

Abby had suggested that they dress for dinner. She had exchanged her shorts and polo-shirt for a diaphanous strapless cocktail dress of lavender. Hawkins changed from his cargo shorts and T-shirt into an olive cotton blazer, fresh jeans and a dark green shirt. They sat at a table on the wide deck, enjoying their food and wine by candlelight, watching the sun dip behind the island, and chatting about Calvin and Sutherland.

After their meeting in Washington, Hawkins had asked Calvin and Sutherland what they planned to do. Calvin had grinned like a mischievous kid.

“I’ve been talking to Abby about transporting Amir’s bomber if I can persuade the old bandit to part with it.”

Sutherland simply said, “I’ll let you know,” before she got on her Harley and rode off like the Lone Ranger.

“Do you think we’ll ever hear from Molly again?” Abby said.

“When she’s ready. In the meantime she’ll be watching every move we make.” Hawkins took a sip of wine and stared up at the star-spattered sky. “We’re damned lucky the gods look out for fools.” He realized his faux pas and said, “No offense, Abby.”

Abby laughed softly. “None taken. I’m glad you asked me to go on the mission.”

“We couldn’t have done it without you, Abby.”

“I’ll have to admit I had my doubts.”

“Can’t imagine why. Having Crazy Matt arrive on your doorstep asking you to go on a dangerous treasure hunt seems like a perfectly normal request.”

“I think Crazy Matt is no more,” she said.

“And I think that we’re out of wine.”

Hawkins opened another bottle and filled their glasses. They sipped their wine in silence for a few minutes, enjoying the rhythmical tap of waves against the hull and the piney scent of the warm Maine night. Abby broke the silence.

“We know what Calvin and Molly’s plans are. Where do we go from here?” Abby said.

“I’ll head back to Woods Hole and play with my robotic toys. I assume you’ll go back to running your company.”

“I didn’t mean professionally. I was talking about us. About our future.”

“Ah,” Hawkins said. “Excuse me for being brain dead. It’s a male thing. What’s your take on the situation?”

She put her glass down on the table and got up. She walked to the stern, staring out at the land lights sparkling against the blue darkness, then turned and said, “There may be a chance for us. There may not be. We’re both different than we were. It’s as if we’ve got to get to know each other all over again.”

Hawkins got up and went over to Abby. The soft breeze was blowing the tender folds of her dress against the curves of her body. He put his arms around her and kissed her neck, her ear, her cheek and finally her lips. He ran his hands down from her shoulder blades to the small of her back, exploring the valley of her vertebrae, the firm roundness of her buttocks, the curve of her thighs. She shivered at his touch although the night was warm as his searching fingers brought back tactile recollections of times past.

“No time like the present to get to know each other again,” he said.

They climbed down into the cabin, leaving a trail of clothes behind them, slipped beneath the sheets of the V-shaped berth in the bow of the boat, made love with a frantic urgency, fell asleep, awoke and made love again, slower and more deliberately, and slept until they were awakened in each other’s arms by the squalling of gulls and sunlight through the portholes.

After they got dressed, Abby took the wheel and they headed south to Matinicus Island where they anchored again and Hawkins whipped up a masterful omelet. They rowed ashore, spent the day exploring the rocky island and later that evening explored each others’ bodies again.

The next morning, they set a direct course back to Camden. Hawkins called ahead to his folks and said that he and Abby would love to visit, but they had to get back for an appointment. After returning the boat, they drove to Portland. Abby summoned her jet and Hawkins caught a commercial flight to Boston. Before taking off, they exchanged the lighthearted kiss and hug of old friends and vowed to keep in touch.

The pain of parting stayed with Hawkins during his flight. When his plane landed in Boston, he caught a bus back to Woods Hole. He had called ahead and Snowy was waiting at the bus stop to give him a ride home in the red pick-up. They made small talk on the ten-minute ride. The afterglow of Hawkins’ cruise with Abby was wearing off, sadly. He realized that their romantic interlude had been only that, with no resolution to what he called their situation. He was still thinking about Abby when they pulled up in front of his house. He glanced at the second floor. The bullet-shattered picture window had been replaced.

“Forgot to mention that there’s a surprise waiting for you,” Snowy said.

As Hawkins got out of the truck, Quisset emerged from around a corner of the house and limped over. One of her back legs wasn’t working quite right, and she wore a collar to prevent her from getting at the bandage on her head, but there was nothing wrong with her wagging tail and she did her best to knock Hawkins over with her usual thigh slam.

Hawkins knelt and gave Quisset a big hug that set off a squirming fit.

It was good to be home.

Mohamed sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked ISI vehicle parked on the side of a hillside road, watching the walled-off villa through the lenses of his night-vision binoculars.

Four cars had disappeared through the wall gate, which was guarded by two men armed with automatic weapons. He couldn’t see what was going on in the villa hidden behind the walls, but he could picture the scene from past experience attending meetings of the Shadow leadership.

The Doctor and his lieutenants would be sitting cross-legged on the bare floor, their backs to the walls of the room. The Doctor would be haranguing them, lacing his tirade with frequent religious references. In this case, the Doctor would be discussing the failure of the Prophet’s Necklace and the disappearance of the man who was going to carry out the plot.

Mohamed knew this because his commander was the one who had told the Shadows that the ISI could no longer provide cover for them. The treasure mission had failed. The Chinese deal had fallen through. Amir was still alive and in control of the lithium fields. The old warlord was looking for the highest bidder, but the U.S. was sweetening its offer by bringing in troops to protect Amir’s village.

Mohamed had heard from a CIA contact that Marzak and not Hawkins had killed his cousin. He had been fond of Saleem, and felt a load of guilt about bringing the professor into the dirty business of intelligence. His contact had said Marzak was dead, but Saleem knew there were others who were complicit in his cousin’s murder. When the commander told him to tie up loose ends, he had no hesitation carrying out the orders.

Mohamed knew that the Doctor was ultra-cautious. He would arrive in one car and leave in another, one of four that would speed off in different directions. Any attacker would have to go after all four cars if he didn’t know the right one.

What the Doctor didn’t know was that one of the men at the gate was in the employ of the ISI. When the gate opened after a few minutes, Mohamed kept his eye on the guard, who dropped his hand and tapped the rear fender of the third vehicle as if sending it on its way.

Mohamed smiled and punched out a number on his cell phone.

“Black Mercedes. Heading east,” he said.

The call was patched through to a dimly-lit windowless room in Tampa, Florida. The pilot in charge of the Predator that had been circling high above the villa worked the joystick and sent the drone winging after its prey. Within minutes the drone’s nose camera picked up the smudge moving in an easterly direction. The operator’s supervisor gave the command to fire, and seconds later two Hellfire missiles streaked out from below the wings of the drone and transformed the Mercedes into a ball of white fire.

The explosion that destroyed the Doctor and his car was soundless in the operations room, but thousands of miles away Mohamed heard the thud and saw the flare in the distance.

He instructed his driver to get moving and said in a low voice, “A torch to light your way to paradise, dear cousin.”

My fiction-writing career owes it start to the bad navigation of an 18th century pirate. For it was in 1717 that a ship, the Whydah went aground, reportedly carrying a fabulous treasure. In the 1980s, three salvage groups went head-to-head, competing to find the wreck. The controversy over the salvage got hot at times and I thought there might be a book in their story. I was working for a newspaper at the time.

I developed my own detective, an ex-cop, diver, fisherman, and PI named Aristotle “Soc” Socarides. He was more philosophical than hard-boiled. Making his first appearance in “Cool Blue Tomb,” the book won the Shamus award for Best Paperback novel. After many years in the newspaper business, I turned to writing fiction and churned out five more books in the series.

Clive Cussler blurbed: “There can be no better mystery writer in America than Paul Kemprecos.”

Despite the accolades, the Soc series lingered in mid-list hell. By the time I finished my last book, I was thinking about another career that might make me more money, like working in a 7-11.

Several months after the release of “Bluefin Blues,” Clive called and said a spin-off from the Dirk Pitt series was in the works. It would be called the NUMA Files and he wondered if I would be interested in tackling the job.

I took on the writing of “Serpent” which brought into being Kurt Austin and the NUMA Special Assignments Team. Austin had some carry-over from Soc, and another team member, Paul Trout, had been born on Cape Cod. The book made The New York Times bestseller list, as did every one of seven NUMA Files that followed, including “Polar Shift,” which bumped “The DaVinci Code” for first place.

After eight NUMA Files I went back to writing solo. I wrote an adventure book entitled, “The Emerald Scepter,” which introduced a new hero, Matinicus “Matt” Hawkins. I have re-released my Soc series in digital and print, and in 2013, responding to numerous requests, I brought Soc back again in a seventh Socarides book entitled, “Grey Lady.” My wife Christi and I live on Cape Cod where she works as a financial advisor. We live in a circa 1865 farmhouse with two cats. We have three children and seven granddaughters.

To learn more about Paul Kemprecos, check out his website at http://www.paulkemprecos.com.