Still alive. Just.

David knelt. Maradi blinked up with scarlet eyes. His mouth moved, wordlessly, or so it seemed.

''I told you I would kill you,'' David said. Or thought he said. His ears were ringing too loudly for him to hear even his own voice.

Maradi's expression was resigned — the irony of it.

David rammed the heel of his palm against the base of the man's nose, driving bone and cartilage upwards into the brain.

Outside, dust hung across the valley in a red-brown fog. Through its skeins and swirls David could see that the place had been devastated. This portion of Petra was more of a ruin than it had ever been. The temple facades were gone, a few spars of column jutting here and there from landslides of rock. The rest was red, cratered moonscape.

The Eagles had dropped dual-cell fusion bombs. Green Osirian ba in one half, white Isisian ba in the other. Within the casing, a thin dividing wall of ceramic that shattered on impact, bringing the two divine essences into sudden contact. The result: a violent melding of diverse powers and a half-kiloton yield.

Having delivered their payload, the jets were now gone. David doubted they would return. Job done.

He went in search of McAllister and Gibbs.

3. West

The desert hissed and shimmered. It was earth that had been flayed by the sun, a patch of planet stripped of all softness, peeled back to the bone. Wadis spoke of rain that came abruptly and in torrents, scored channels in the ground, then vanished, offering little relief. Plants here lived a half-existence, deep roots tapping for moisture while shoots were brittle to the point of crumbling. Snakes and scorpions raced from shade to shade.

Three men came walking. Two of them supported the third, who hobbled along on one leg. The other leg ended in a ragged mass of flesh, a thing that hung limp and useless and looked only vaguely like a foot. A belt was tied around the thigh in a tourniquet.