Sascha Duffy stopped at a red light that filtered traffic onto a roundabout. She was first at the light, and they were second. There was no one behind them. It was perfect.

Faulkner drew up to a stop behind the Audi.

Beatrix opened the door, got out and, drawing her Sig, jogged up to the passenger side door. She knew that it would be locked—that was de rigeur for a Western woman driving around Basra on her own—but that was not a problem. She used the butt of the pistol to smash the glass, reached in and opened the door from the inside and got in.

Sascha Duffy screamed and fumbled the car into first gear. Beatrix reached across and laid her right hand across Sascha’s hand on the gearstick.

“Relax,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you. Your husband is fine.” She laid the Sig on her lap, drawing the woman’s eyes to it. “But I need you to come with me.”

They waited until the GPS tracker on Duffy’s car was on the move and then set off. Faulkner was in the Freelander and Beatrix was driving Sascha Duffy’s Audi. Sascha was in the back, her hands fastened behind her back with cable ties.

Duffy had been at the Rumaila complex all day and into the night, and now he was coming back into Basra. That was ideal for what they had in mind. The road passed through the occasional village and shanty, but for the most part, it sliced through barren desert. It was a sixty-minute drive. There would be plenty of opportunities to do what had to be done.

They hurried out of the city, skirting Zubayr and finding a quiet spot on the road to the north of the Al Mufrash airstrip. The road here followed the route of a dried-out wadi, dipping down into a depression so that the sides rose up four or five feet. It was a natural choke point that would be impossible to evade without backing up.

Faulkner drove on for thirty seconds before running off-road and parked the Freelander behind a grove of palm trees that would hide it from traffic approaching from the southwest.

Beatrix drove around a curve that would hide the Audi until the last possible minute.

They waited. The sky was dark, the stars scattered like diamonds across velvet. The horizon was lightened by the flames from the oilfields, and the sound of machinery was audible from miles away.

She saw a pair of headlights in the distance, heading right at them. She took out her phone and texted the tracker.

It pinged back its response.

A blue dot closing in on her red dot.

Duffy.

She drove the Audi into the middle of the road, leaving it with no room to pass on either side.