Mayakovsky walked to the doorway of the army hut and glanced outside. The landscape here in the Khyber Pass was the most desolate anyone could imagine. Bare rock gullies and mountains, one after another like waves of the sea, with nothing green growing for as far as the eye could see. It looked like the debris left over after the world had been made. In every gully there were a thousand places for the moujahadeen to hide, every one of them a crack shot. The children here had rifles in their hands before they could walk.

His eyes roamed the barren scene, the air shimmering like water in the baking heat. It was the most God-forsaken flybitten ass-end spot on earth, he thought. He longed for the green parks of Moscow and the taste of ice-cold kvas.

They were wasting their time. He had told those GRU idiots that. All of the tribes in these parts were Pathans. They never talked. The GRU officer had looked blankly at Mayakovsky as if he didn’t understand Russian.

“Orders are orders,” the officer had pedantically remarked.

Mayakovsky shrugged. Orders were orders, but the sooner he got out of this God-forsaken shit-hole the better.

With a sigh, he turned back and motioned to his men. Once again they took the red-hot iron from the coals and held it to the old man’s feet, the skin long since burnt to a blackened crisp.

The old man’s thin scream pierced the silent hut. His breathing was labored. He was going, Mayakovsky thought.

He leaned down to the old man’s ear. A fly buzzed his cheek as he did so and he irritably brushed it away.

“Tell me where the Scorpion is and I’ll make the pain go away,” Mayakovsky whispered seductively.

The old man’s eyes were half-closed. Mayakovsky wasn’t sure he even heard him.

But the old man had heard. His pain would soon be over, he knew. Soon Allah would gather him into his bosom and he would drink the cool waters of the Fount of Selsabil. What a fool this Russian was, he thought. As if anyone could reveal the Scorpion’s whereabouts. The Scorpion was as the desert wind.

The old man smiled.

Who can capture the wind?

About the Author

About the Author

Andrew Kaplan is the author of two bestselling spy thriller series, Scorpion and Homeland, as well as three earlier novels, Dragonfire, Hour of the Assassins, and War of the Raven, which was selected by the American Library Association as one of the one hundred best books ever written about World War II. His novels have been translated into twenty languages. A veteran of the US Army and Israel’s Six Day War, he has traveled the world as a freelance journalist. Visit him at www.andrewkaplan.com.

ANDREW KAPLAN

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