Payton continued to stand beside him with his gloved hands trembling around the binoculars. Scarborough did not want to lose a beat getting his own set of glasses out of their case. The buzzing had grown louder and louder, filling his ears as it surged between the stone walls on either side of him. To his unaided eyes, the thing from inside the notch appeared to be a dark cloud of ground smoke churning around a solid and even darker core. At its present rate of acceleration it would be upon them in less than a minute. And he didn’t have a clue what it might be.

“I need the glasses,” he told Payton. “Hurry.”

The techie didn’t answer. He seemed oblivious to Scarborough, paralyzed with shock.

Scarborough reached out to take the binocs, but Payton’s grasp was unyielding. He pulled harder, snatched them from Payton’s petrified fingers, wiped the frost off them.

A glance through the eyepieces immediately told him what had induced Payton’s mental disconnect.

The cloud was not smoke but a storm of powdery reddish-brown sand. And the object kicking it up as it raced ever closer was something that should not have been in the pass, the valleys, nor anywhere on the continent. Not for any conceivable reason.

A storm, that’s it. Scarborough’s thought burst through the door of his memory with haunting irony. The fear arrived an instant later. A desert storm.

“Alan, talk to me.” Bradley had inched close, her arm brushing against him. “Tell me what you see out there.”

Scarborough held up a hand.

“Wait,” he said. “I need to be positive.”

But that was a lie. Scarborough knew what he saw in spite of his initial disbelief. What he really needed was to pull himself together.

When he’d served with the Corps in the Persian Gulf War, special forces units had used tricked-out dune buggies called Fast Attack Vehicles in advance recon and hit-and-run combat missions. Stripped down to their welded tubular frames and roll bars, their low-slung carriages left virtually no discernible signature for enemies to sniff and chase, which led to their reputation as the earthbound equivalents of Stealth bombers. Accommodating two riders in front and a third in an elevated rear gunner’s chair, they held various configurations of roof-mounted antitank tubes, forward and rear machine guns, grenade launchers, and side compartments for gear, small arms, and ammo storage. Back in the day, Scarborough and a buddy had taken an FAV for a workout in the desert and gone belting over dunes and trenches at an uninterrupted eighty-five miles per hour.