Pocketing his aviator glasses in the waning daylight, Kuhl felt a cool breeze drift across the plateau and dry the perspiration on his dun colored head scarf. He heard the Lockheed's turbines powering up on the airstrip behind him, turned from the partially evacuated camp in the ravine downslope, and watched as the last and most important items of payload were carried aboard the transport in plain wooden crates.

Despite how well things had gone, he was mildly ill at ease, and could not quite put his finger on the reason why. Perhaps it was just the precise and demanding timetable to which he'd needed to adhere, coupled with an impatience to get on to Kazakhstan. There was always a tightness within him before he made his finishing thrust. Yet this unsettled feeling had a somewhat different quality, and he wondered if the almost too smooth progression of events thus far--the absence of any outward sign that Roger Gordian's people had made substantial headway following the trail of their attackers, or were pursuing it with the aggressiveness one might expect of such an estimable force--might not be the cause of it. As a hunter, Kuhl knew the advantage of circling in silence. But he also knew that there were circles within circles. That a hunter at the edge of the smaller circle could all too easily become prey at the center of the larger ...

A pair of men in khaki fatigues with Steyr AUG assault rifles slung over their shoulders--the FAMAS guns already on their way to Kazakhstan--approached him from outside the plane's cargo section.

"We've been told everything is ready for your takeoff," one of them said.

Kuhl motioned toward the retrofitted DC-3 further down the ramp. It was still being packed with freight conveyed by the lines of jeeps and trucks moving between the airfield and the gully below.

"I want the decampment to continue without holdup," he said. "Make sure the pilot of that plane knows he's to leave here no longer than half an hour after we've gone. And stay on top of the loading."

The man who'd spoken to him nodded. Before he could turn to begin carrying out his orders, Kuhl took note of the bandage around his upper arm.

"How is the wound, Manuel?" he asked in Spanish.

"Esta mejor, it is much better."

Kuhl made a fist and struck it to his heart.

"A lo hecho, pecho, " he said. It was an old expression he had picked up somewhere along the way. "To the chest, that which is done. Accept gladly all you have accomplished."

Manuel looked at him in silence. Then he nodded again and strode off toward the DC-3 with his companion.

Kuhl lingered for a brief while afterward, his back to the runway, staring out into the shadows as they rose from the lowlands like the waters of some dark, swollen river that had begun to overflow its banks, spreading across the lofty, sand-blown table on which he stood.