“Maybe,” said Patton. “Probably the thing doesn’t even work anymore.”

“Yes, but one more step and I could have blown sky-high.”

“Look, you’re a soldier. You know that saving lives during battle is just doing your job. So let’s forget about it and get on with the job, OK. Besides, there are a thousand things that could go wrong in the next few hours and we just avoided number three. Now keep an eye out for that patrol.”

Patton was just about to dash across the fifty meters or so of rocky open space between her and the top of the hill, when she spotted something that made her sigh, “Oh crap,” and sink back down next to Bob.

“What’s wrong,” said Bob.

“Looks like that paranoid bitch has a surveillance camera up there,” said Patton. She pulled out the binoculars to confirm what she already knew. Fifty meters away stood the very thing they had come to find, a small satellite dish that provided Ingrid Weiss with her sole method of communicating with the outside world from her underground bunker where no cell signal would reach. The dish was mounted on a pole shoved into the rocky soil, and just below it, on the same pole, was a video camera.

“Maybe you can get around behind it,” said Bob. Before he had finished his sentence, Patton watched as the camera pivoted clockwise a quarter turn.

“If it turns like that, I can’t get behind it,” said Patton with a smile. “But I might be able to stay ahead of it. Set a timer on my mark.” She watched through the binoculars until the camera pivoted again and said, “Mark.” On the next pivot she said, “Mark” again, and so on until the camera had made two full revolutions.

“Thirty seconds between each mark,” said Bob.

“If it’s a wide angle,” said Patton, “there’s only one position where it won’t see me coming.”

“Think you can get up that hill carrying a pack of equipment in under thirty seconds?” said Bob.