Yussuf shook his head and pointed. “Rat,” he said. “Fat rat.”

“Let’s go on,” Abdul said impatiently. “You can spear it on your way back.”

“It was beautiful,” Yussuf insisted. “I want to kill it.”

“Yussuf,” Abdul said, “we’ve only got about seven hours.”

And of course it was true. In seven hours the rain would come, drowning every sign of the raiders.

The white moon waned. The sand went black. I couldn’t see Qazwini’s thick shoulders six feet in front of me. I couldn’t see my hand brushing the sweat from my face. Yussuf flicked the flashlight on and off, moving with swift assurance down what to him was a trail. I thought I heard sounds, sounds of what could only have been a moving enemy presence, but Yussuf gave no sign of awareness and certainly his hearing was more acute than mine, and his imagination less febrile. One consolation: daylight would soon dispel the night’s obscurity, but it would also herald an end to hope. Even if Val survived the experience she would probably prefer that she had not.

How far we lurched and stumbled I do not know before a faint sliver of light broke through from the east. We came to a slot of gingko trees, bobbing and weaving in caloric waves. Before us stretched a scabby plain, totally devoid of life except for an immense cloud of insects that hummed and tumbled and pulsated, beating their translucent wings like fans, as if to keep from frying in the heat. Yussuf squinted at a thin, solitary wisp of smoke curling up on the horizon. “There they are,” he said.

“How many?” Abdul asked.

“Nine,” the rat-catcher said. He glanced at the sky grown suddenly dark. A flock of hysterical birds, thousands of them and out of nowhere, circled like a screeching tornado and swooped down on the bugs for the morning kill.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

“The rain,” Abdul said, “or they’ll spot us.”

We waited. Not long. The sky opened up and the deluge came. Lightning turned the earth an electric blue. Red columns of thunder slouched across the plain and hammered my skull and I thought of my father scorching the earth of Vietnam as an artillery lieutenant. For the first time in years I remembered his stories of loud destruction. Odd, I thought, those stories told with incongruous relish by a quiet man about his days of bedlam. The notion had often crossed my mind that those war years were the happiest of his life.