“I have work to do,” he snapped.

“I’m coming too,” she said, starting to get up. He shoved her back down.

“Don’t be stupid! This is the safest place. It’d take a direct hit from above to get you. Just keep your head down, and you’ll be OK,” he said, crouching on the ledge, his head just below the lip of the well.

“What about you?”

“I’ll be back for you.”

“Will you? Will you, really?” she cried.

“Yes,” he said, looking into her incredible violet eyes for an instant before vaulting over the edge.

Almost immediately he found himself being fired upon. White-hot fragments of metal whizzed all around him as he crawled like a scurrying insect on the burning ground. He couldn’t get a fix on the source. It seemed to be coming from everywhere all at once. He crawled blindly without direction.

Suddenly a shape loomed up off to the side barely ten feet away. It was one of Abdul Sa’ad’s soldiers rising up and aiming his AK-47 directly at the Scorpion’s head. In desperation, the Scorpion flung the spear with all his might.

The soldier stared with stunned disbelief at the wooden spear shaft protruding from his belly. He seemed too shocked to do anything but stand there, as if unable to believe that he had been killed by a spear in this day and age. The Scorpion leaped forward, kicking at the soldier’s thigh and grabbing for the AK-47. As the soldier fell abruptly backward, the spear standing straight up like a flagpole, the Scorpion had already grabbed the Kalachnikov away. He fired a round into the soldier’s head to make sure the gun worked. The bullet shattered the skull like a smashed melon.

Ricochets whined all around the Scorpion’s feet, the fire coming from the direction of the old fortress. He dived behind the body, burying his face in the blood-moistened sand. He could hear the thunks as bullets slammed into the body. If he didn’t get to King Salim soon, everything was lost, but he was pinned down with nothing between him and the fortress but flat open space and rubble.

In the distance he could see a line of slowly advancing Saudi National Guard tanks and APCs, white puffs of smoke billowing from their guns. And beyond was a ragged army of tribesmen on foot and in pick-up trucks, firing wildly as they advanced under the billowing green banner of the House of Saud strung from radio antennae. And his heart leaped up as among them he saw the white Toyota trucks of the Mutayr as they charged screaming their battle cry, “Allah Akhbar!” “God is Great!” at the top of their lungs. It had worked! he thought triumphantly. They had found him by the transmitter and the tribesmen and National Guard had rallied around the king.