“Just thinking about how attractive almost any other line of work looks right now,” he said, listening to his vertebrae cracking like walnuts as he stretched. Thank Allah for the sand. It had cushioned his fall. Now it felt smooth and cool as he felt his way around the well in the darkness.

The mound of sand sloped down on all sides from the center and the well had a diameter of about six feet. The walls were rough sandstone. If only he had a light, he thought.

“I wish we had some light,” he said.

“We do. I have a lamp. Abdul Sa’ad’s orders. I put it out when I heard them opening the stone,” she said, flicking on a gold and diamond Dunhill lighter and lighting the spout of an old oil lamp. Her face was gold and shadowed in the flamelight, like a face on a renaissance church panel. She was even more beautiful than her pictures had suggested and it was all he could do to keep himself from grabbing her. Having come so close to dying, the life force surged inside him and at that moment, he had never wanted a woman so badly. He felt himself coming so sharply erect it was almost painful. But she had been so badly used by others, he told himself bitterly. She was fragile and wounded and the last thing she needed was another man just grabbing at her.

She held the lamp up to see him better.

“You have an interesting face. Not a pretty face but one can see something in it. I can see why there have been whispers about you,” she murmured almost to herself.

“In the desert a whisper is only the sound of the wind on the sands,” he said.

“No it’s more than that. You’re a kind of legend. Some of the soldiers said you were a demon. Others said you were an assassin. What will they say now if you return from the dead? … that the Scorpion is a kind of god.”

“Ignorant people always try to make good men into mediocre gods,” he said impatiently. He could smell the closeness of her. There was a clean sweetness about it, like the desert at dawn.

“What else have you got?” he asked, clenching his fists to keep from taking her in his arms.

“I don’t know. There’s an old stick in here. It looks like it might have been part of an ancient spear,” she said.

“What else?”

“That’s all there is … except for me,” she said. She was very close. They were almost touching. The tips of her breasts grazed the bulletproof fabric wrapped around his chest.

“The transmitter!” he shouted suddenly, bringing them both out of a trance. They hurriedly unwound the dense plastic mesh from around his chest.