The man who had slipped out lay flat in the brush for a good hour, not moving. Patience in these matters was everything. Possibly this site had been discovered. Perhaps it was an elaborate Israeli ruse, and perhaps capture and interrogation and ultimately surrender—no one held out forever—lay ahead. Having penetrated the Zionist homeland, he was risking everything, knowing himself to be a high-priority target.

But nothing happened. No commandos swept in for the arrest. Once or twice, late-returning citizens drove by, one in a BMW, the other in a Mercedes. He heard car doors slam, and a wife yell at a husband. But that was all.

When at last he felt secure, he slid back farther into the undergrowth. He knew the layout only from photos and diagrams. As usual, design diverged considerably from reality. The night was darker, the trees thicker, the turf spongier, the night smell of shrubbery and the sea more intense. His fingers probed, and for a second he experienced a whisper of panic. Suppose it wasn’t here? Suppose he couldn’t find it? Suppose he failed? Suppose—

But the supposition exercise became moot in the next second as his fingers came across, an inch or so under some low accumulation of loose dirt, the heavy canvas of a gun case. He pulled, the thing emerged, and he drew it to him.

Without needing to see, he unzipped the canvas bag and removed the object it concealed and protected. His fingers closed on the familiar configuration of the Russian-designed Dragunov sniper rifle, a semi-automatic beast that shot the old tsarist 7.62×54R rounds, same as they had used in the Russo-Japanese War of a hundred-odd years ago. He knew it as well as one could know a thing. He had always loved the Dragon, from his first glimpse many years ago, such an improvement over the claptrap junkiness of the AK-47.

This Dragon, one of his best, was purely a parts gun, assembled from recovered battlefield castoffs. It had a Romanian receiver, a Polish stock, and a Russian barrel. An irony utterly lost on him was that it was universally called the Dragon, but its naming had nothing to do with that mythical beast. It was simply prosaic Russian policy to designate firearms by their designer’s name, and the designer happened to be named Dragunov. This gun was highly tuned for accuracy, with minute filing of the trigger sear arrangements, the springs cut to a minimum for less vibration, the barrel cleansed to the atomic level, all of it lovingly reassembled, each screw torqued to the appropriate weight for maximum accuracy. It was perfect and it was untraceable and, therefore, expendable.