He saw nothing stirring on the far side. They couldn’t be there, he decided. Troops as sloppy as these would have given away their position with some movement by now. The officer had decided to play it safe, relying on the line of mines, the block at the arfaj bush and his own entrenched troops, combined with the element of surprise to pull it off. He probably didn’t anticipate a well-armed resistance from a few Bedu in trucks and didn’t want his fairly green troops shooting at each other.

Allah be with us, because even so thirty is too many, the Scorpion prayed. But he would have to do it, because there was no way around the wadi, he decided, taking a deep breath.

Moving carefully so as not to make the slightest sound, he placed a rock near the edge. Then he propped the sentry’s body against the rock with the AK-47 in a firing position, as a decoy. Next to the body, he placed a white phosphorus grenade with a two-minute delay fuse. With luck, they would be firing at the decoy after he had faded into the darkness.

He prepared four fragmentation grenades in position to be rolled down the slope and set up the wire coil still connected to the tripwire below. He anchored a coil of climbing rope to a rock and silently paid it out down the face of the cliff, away from the ledge where the Arabs crouched. Then he laid out the flare pistol and clicked off the safety of the XM-203. When everything was ready, he wiped the sweat from his eyes and took a last look around.

He zeroed the XM-203 on the distant arfaj and studied the opposite slope carefully, but he could see nothing. If he was wrong and it was a cross fire setup, then he was sending Youssef and Zaid and the Mutayr to their deaths. Below him he could hear the restless moving of the Arabs strung out along the ledge.

The sky was purple and black and the wadi was filled with shadows. It was the time of the maghrib prayer, the time of poorest visibility. As always, the instant before combat was like the instant before you jumped out of a plane. His mind returned to something Sergeant Walker had said during airborne training.

“The thing is—once you’ve jumped, you’re committed. Parachuting down isn’t bad, but the moment before you jump is just pure shit!”

The Scorpion took a grenade in each hand and pulled first one pin and then the other. Hoping for maximum confusion, he rolled one down towards the far right position and the other towards the far left. As the grenades pounced down the rocky slope like dislodged pebbles, he heard a voice from below. Then he yanked on the tripwire.