The Scorpion scuttled on all fours in sudden starts and without noise, like a lizard. He remembered Sheikh Zaid’s teaching of long ago that a true Bedu can hide in full view behind a rock that wouldn’t conceal a jird. Like the tiny sand rat, he moved unseen, almost without disturbing a grain of sand. At each pause, his eyes and ears searched for the slightest hint of anything unnatural, his heart pounding desperately.

Something made him glance up. He rolled carefully onto his back. High above he could barely make out the distant silhouette of a falcon sailing effortlessly on a thermal. He scanned the shadows along the slopes searching for an outline or a glint of metal, but there was nothing but the deafening sound of his own pulse and the blink of sweat in his eyes.

This was what it was all about, he thought. All the years and schemes. All for these few minutes when you were tested to the uttermost and the penalty for error was death. He searched desperately for some indication of mines in the dusk light which was turning the sands first to honey and then to a channel of blood between the hills.

They had undoubtedly mined the road and probably a line of mines off the road as well. But there was nothing but millions of choppy little wavelets of sand.

Suppose he was wrong, he wondered suddenly. Suppose there was no ambush and he was just acting out of fear? How would the Mutayr look at him then? Would they still follow him? And then, if Abdul Sa’ad came at him in some other place, surprise would be total. What was it Koenig had taught them? “In combat, you don’t get a second chance,” Koenig used to say, his eyes narrowed as over a gun sight as he stared them down in the Quonset-hut classroom.

But still he saw nothing. Maybe it was all a mistake, he thought, feverishly wiping the sweat from his face on his sleeve. They had to be here, he thought, a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach as he took out a curious object from his sleeve; a broken car radio antenna which he opened like a telescope.

He crept forward, flowing imperceptibly from one depression in the ground to the next, his fingers dancing along the surface of the sand like spider legs. He poked the car antenna gently into the sand, using it as a probe for mines.