On the third day the visits stopped, the charred equipment left to rot. Since then Stein had been alone. He supposed it was better than capture, yet the subsequent fight for survival had stretched his training and tenacity to their limits. Hydration quickly proved the most serious problem, but after four parched days a desperate Stein had crawled to the donkey’s carcass and found two untouched water bladders beneath. A full ten liters that had lasted until this morning.

So today Stein had gone on another search, dragging himself over the sand like a bent snake, turning over burned canvas packs and looking under charred cloth. There had been no water, but he found something even more precious. At the bottom of a crater and half buried in sand—where Dani had been perhaps?—a personal locator beacon. A locator beacon with one bar remaining on the battery.

His spirits soared on the discovery, and Stein crawled back to his lair where he dusted off the device under the makeshift shade tarp. They had each been issued one of the units, an ERB-6, the latest in personal satellite technology. Stein spent ten minutes composing his text message, knowing he would likely only have one shot. He included his emergency code word, and a brief mention of his injury. His position on the roof of the Kavir Desert would be accurate to within a few yards, and automatically enciphered before transmission. Stein hit the Send button holding his breath, and watched as the screen churned and finally announced: MESSAGE SENT.

Now he could only wait.

The sun was rising high, cooking night into day, and in the distance Stein saw a dust cyclone swirling. Farther yet, in a teasing image at the base of the northern mountains, he saw the lifting billow of a rain shower. He had turned the beacon off after his one transmission—it wasn’t designed as a two-way device—but now he wondered whether there might be one more burst in the battery. Probably not, he decided. With that depressing thought, Stein pulled out his last energy bar. He almost broke it in half, but then shifted his dirt-encrusted fingers to make two breaks. Three pieces. One for each day.

If help didn’t come by then, it would almost certainly be too late.

*   *   *

Just after ten o’clock that morning, a bleary-eyed Raymond Nurin found himself walking lengthwise along the southern side of a steep hill outside Montvendre, France. To his left and right he saw long trellises anchored into the rich brown earth, and climbing these, matted in morning dew, were the priceless canopies of Roussette. The grapes had already been harvested and the vines pruned for the season, but that was the limit of his untrained assessment.