“Zahid,” she whispered. “Are you hit?”

“Not badly.”

It was too dark to see much more than the outline of him, but she watched as he teetered and sagged against the cave wall.

“Tell me what happened in Sarabat,” she said.

The fact that they had distinctly different definitions of a successful conclusion to this evening was making an already disastrous situation even worse. She wanted to get the information she’d come for and beat a quiet retreat with all her body parts still intact. He, on the other hand, wanted a nice helping of revenge followed by his quota of celestial virgins.

“We were paid,” he said as she began scanning the slope through her scope again. “I don’t know who it was and I don’t think the elders did either. They gave us new AK-47s and information on where men who guarded Sarabat were. They told us to attack in the middle of the day and that there would be no resistance.”

He finally managed to get hold of her assault rifle and fired another burst, unconcerned that there was no visible target.

“Stop doing that!” she whispered harshly. “You’re not even getting close and you’re going to run us out of ammunition. Why the middle of the day?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sliding down the rock wall into an awkward seated position. His voice was already starting to lose strength. “I was skeptical, but the money was very good. And it was an opportunity to finally defeat Sarabat after so many years of insults.”

She squeezed off a quick shot, kicking up some dust near the boulder the easternmost man was hiding behind. A reminder that they hadn’t been forgotten.

As she chambered another round, he burst into view and traversed five meters farther east while his companion sprayed the wall she was lying at the edge of.

They were going to keep spreading out until they could safely pass their position and get the high ground. If that happened, things were going to get really ugly really fast.

“And was what they told you true? Was there no resistance?”

“It was true,” he said at a volume that was hard to hear. She wasn’t sure if it was his injury or the memory of what had happened in Sarabat.

“The men wouldn’t fight. The children and women did. But the men just stood there and died like sheep.”

The merc to the east moved again when a gust swirled up enough dust to obscure him. She fired into the cloud, but blew the shot and sent the round spinning off into the darkness.

And that was it. He’d made it far enough that she wouldn’t be able to get a bead on him without exposing herself to his teammate. It would probably take him another two minutes to satisfy himself that this was the case and then not much more than another one or two to get above them. She glanced behind her at the blackness of the crack passing through the cliff. There wasn’t much more time.