For that, Ibrahim thought as he spurred his horse forward over the rugged slopes, if for no other reason, the man-made caves south of Derinkuyu would have been an ideal hideaway for Gilea Nastik and her cousin Korut Zelva after the Times Square bombing. There were many Kurdish sympathizers in these isolated regions, hillmen who tended to be suspicious of anyone they didn’t know, and who would resent intrusions into local affairs by outsiders. Even those who were politically neutral would have nothing to do with the group that had come hunting for the terrorists.

And since he was Roger Gordian’s man on the spot in this isolated territory, Ibrahim worried that if any local tribesmen spotted his riding party, the butchers were almost certain to be alerted.

He rode at a steady gallop, the muscular, sweat-slick sides of his steed rippling like oil beneath his stirrups. The sun was plunging solidly down on his shoulders, giving a bleached-out shimmer to the terrain ... a wasteland so stark and craggy that nothing on wheels—not ATVs, not even Sword’s small fleet of fast-attack vehicles—could have traversed it.

There were stretches here that seemed to exist in a still pocket of eternity, Ibrahim mused. Stretches where change was resisted at an elemental level, where roads and telephone lines came to the end of their reach, and large distances were traveled on horseback or not at all. The land did not compromise; you adapted or you were defeated.

Ibrahim rode on, his hands loosely gripping the reins. The neck of his horse rose and fell, rose and fell, with an easy, swaying sort of rhythm. To his left and right, the hooves of his teammates’ mounts slapped the ground, beating up little clods of pebbles and ashy soil. The men wore lightweight dun-colored fatigues and carried VVRS M16 rifles fitted with M234 RAG kinetic-energy projectile launchers. They had gas masks and protective goggles strapped around their necks.

Perhaps a kilometer distant, Ibrahim could see a huge arch-backed formation pushing up from the surrounding terrain. The honeycomb tiers of openings on its high rock walls had once led to the lodgings of a caravansary. There traveling merchants would come to a temporary halt in their routes, bringing supplies to the cities beneath the ground, descending from the upper chambers through long stepped passages.

Now, Ibrahim knew, the passages would be filled with scorpions—human scorpions as well as the traditional ones. And the mission of his team was to flush out their hiding place, and capture the deadliest of the creatures, without killing any of them. The quarry, however, would show no such compunction. Given a chance, they would slaughter him and every one of his men, leave them to rot on the barren earth.